Acquire a lock on two mutexes and avoid deadlock

Question

The following code contains a potential deadlock, but seems to be necessary: to safely copy data to one container from another, both containers must be locked to prevent cha

Answer 1

To avoid a deadlock its probably best, to wait until both resources can be locked:

Dont know which mutex API you are using so here is some arbitrary pseudo code, assume that can_lock() only checks if it can lock a mutex, and that try_lock() returns true if it did lock, and false, if the mutex is already locked by somebody else.

void foo::copy(const foo & rhs)
{
    for(;;)
    {
        if(! pMutex->cany_lock() || ! rhs.pMutex->cany_lock())
        {
            // Depending on your environment call or dont call sleep()
            continue;
        }
        if(! pMutex->try_lock())
            continue;
        if(! rhs.pMutex->try_lock())
        {
            pMutex->try_lock()
            continue;
        }
        break;
    }
    // do copy
}