Sync Mechanisms

The threads library provides three primary synchronization mechanisms:

• Mutexes. Mutual exclusion primitives that block access to variables from other threads. They enforce exclusive access by a single thread to a variable or a set of variables.

• Joins. A thread waits for other threads to finish.

• Condition variables. While mutexes provide synchronization by controlling thread access to data, condition variables allow threads to synchronize based on the actual value/state of the data.