Stage 9.14: Sharing Across Threads
Mutex (abbreviation for mutual exclusion) is a container data structure
commonly held by smart pointers that takes in data and lets us borrow mutable and immutable
references to the data within. This prevents borrowing from being abused by having the operating
system restrict only one CPU thread at time to have access to the data, blocking other threads
until that original thread is done with its locked borrow.
Multithreading is beyond the scope of Rust Jungle, but Mutex is a fundamental part of
orchestrating multiple CPU threads accessing the same data.
There is a special smart pointer Arc which is identical to Rc except
uses thread-safe incrementing of reference counts. It's often used to have many references to
the same
Mutex.
Further information: