Synchronization primitive is a mechanism for coordinating access to shared state between concurrent threads or processes, preventing race conditions. Primitives split into mutual exclusion (e.g., Mutex), which ensures only one thread accesses data at a time, and communication/coordination (e.g., Semaphore, CSP), which lets threads signal each other.

All synchronization primitives ultimately rely on hardware atomics (compare-and-swap) and the OS scheduler's ability to block and wake threads.

This example shows a mutex protecting shared data from race conditions.

// compile: gcc -pthread -o sync sync.c
// run: ./sync
// description: mutex prevents concurrent access to shared counter
 
#include <pthread.h>
#include <stdio.h>
 
int counter = 0;
pthread_mutex_t lock = PTHREAD_MUTEX_INITIALIZER;
 
void* increment(void* arg) {
    for (int i = 0; i < 100000; i++) {
        pthread_mutex_lock(&lock);
        counter++;
        pthread_mutex_unlock(&lock);
    }
    return NULL;
}
 
int main() {
    pthread_t t1, t2;
    pthread_create(&t1, NULL, increment, NULL);
    pthread_create(&t2, NULL, increment, NULL);
    pthread_join(t1, NULL);
    pthread_join(t2, NULL);
    printf("Counter: %d\n", counter);
    return 0;
}