Rust Concurrency & Atomics

Comprehensive guide based on Rust Atomics and Locks by Mara Bos and The Rust Programming Language Ch. 16.

When to Use This Skill

• Implementing lock-free or wait-free data structures
• Understanding Ordering (Relaxed, Acquire, Release, AcqRel, SeqCst)
• Building custom mutexes, channels, or condition variables
• Debugging data races or incorrect synchronization
• Understanding Send, Sync, and thread safety markers
• Using Arc<Mutex<T>> and Arc<RwLock<T>> patterns
• Working with std::sync::atomic types

Thread Safety Markers

Send

A type is Send if it can be transferred to another thread. Most types are Send. Notable exceptions: Rc<T>, raw pointers, MutexGuard (on some platforms).