Shared State Concurrency

One common challenge in concurrency is managing shared state across multiple threads. Rust's ownership model, along with types like Mutex and Arc (atomic reference counting), makes this task safe and efficient.

In this challenge, you will implement a generic shared state system and use it to create thread-safe counters and other shared data structures.

Your Task

Implement three functions that demonstrate different aspects of shared state concurrency:

  1. create_shared_data: Creates shared state with any type T
  2. increment_counter: Demonstrates multiple threads modifying shared state
  3. modify_shared_data: Generic function for thread-safe modifications

Requirements

  1. The create_shared_data function should:

    • Accept any type T
    • Wrap it in a Mutex and Arc
    • Return the thread-safe container

  2. The increment_counter function should:

    • Accept an Arc<Mutex<i32>>
    • Spawn the specified number of threads
    • Return handles to all spawned threads

  3. The modify_shared_data function should:

    • Perform modifications in a new thread
    • Return the thread handle

Notes
  • Ignore error handling for this challenge, you can use unwrap() to simplify the code
  • Have a look at the main function to see how the functions are used

Hints
Click here to reveal hints
  • Use Arc::new(Mutex::new(initial)) to create thread-safe containers
  • Remember to cheap clone the Arc when passing it to a new thread. e.g. let cloned = Arc::clone(&shared_data)
  • Use lock().unwrap() to access the data inside the Mutex
  • To send data to a thread, the data must implement the Send trait and have a lifetime that outlives the thread 'static