Performing exception safe shared locking with std::unique_lock and std::shared_lock

Since the operation of threads is a heavily operating system support-related thing and the STL provides good operating system-agnostic interfaces for that, it is also wise to provide STL support for synchronization between threads. This way, we can not only start and stop threads without external libraries but also synchronize them with abstractions from a single unified library: the STL.

In this recipe, we will have a look at STL mutex classes and RAII lock abstractions. While we play around with some of them in our concrete recipe implementation, we will also get an overview of more synchronization helpers that the STL provides.

How to do it...

We are going to write a program that uses an std::shared_mutex instance in its exclusive and shared modes and to see what that means. Additionally, we do not call the lock and unlock functions ourselves but do the locking with automatic unlocking using RAII helpers...