I attended one interview two days back. The interviewed guy was good in C++, but not in multithreading. When he asked me to write a code for multithreading of two threads, where one thread prints 1,3,5,.. and the other prints 2,4,6,.. . But, the output should be 1,2,3,4,5,.... So, I gave the below code(sudo code)
mutex_Lock LOCK;
int last=2;
int last_Value = 0;
void function_Thread_1()
{
while(1)
{
mutex_Lock(&LOCK);
if(last == 2)
{
cout << ++last_Value << endl;
last = 1;
}
mutex_Unlock(&LOCK);
}
}
void function_Thread_2()
{
while(1)
{
mutex_Lock(&LOCK);
if(last == 1)
{
cout << ++last_Value << endl;
last = 2;
}
mutex_Unlock(&LOCK);
}
}
After this, he said "these threads will work correctly even without those locks. Those locks will reduce the efficiency". My point was without the lock there will be a situation where one thread will check for(last == 1 or 2) at the same time the other thread will try to change the value to 2 or 1. So, My conclusion is that it will work without that lock, but that is not a correct/standard way. Now, I want to know who is correct and in which basis?