The write priority of RW locks is a classical pitfall. Even knowing about this, I ended up falling into the exact same bug described in the article at least a c

The write priority of RW locks is a classical pitfall. Even knowing about this, I ended up falling into the exact same bug described in the article at least a couple of times. If anyone is wondering why RW mutexes block new readers if there is a waiting writer, the reason is to prevent writer starvation: if, say, two threads continuously acquire and release read locks, there may never be a point in time in which no thread is holding a lock, and the writer is stuck waiting forever. Some mutexes can be configured to use read priority, but that is something that should only be done if it can be proven that starvation cannot happen. This is a reminder that read locks do not absolve from being careful about what happens in the critical section; it should be made as small as possible no matter whether the lock is exclusive or shared.