Rust doesn't solve this. You can easily make the same mistake as the article describes, in Rust. Thiez points out that a Rust mutex wraps the data it protects

Rust doesn't solve this. You can easily make the same mistake as the article describes, in Rust. Thiez points out that a Rust mutex wraps the data it protects. But that doesn't fix the issue described in the article. The C++ in the article also accesses all mutex-protected data safely. You could translate it almost line-for-line to Rust and still have the same race hazard. It's because the race hazard is from wait-condition ordering, rather than mutex-protected data. The article explains, it's tempting and intuitive to make kill_flag an atomic, outside the data protected by the mutex, because it's a sticky state, only written in one place. I've seen this pattern used often enough in the real world, sometimes with the flag being a global variable. People do it. Shutdowns get stuck occasionally, nobody is sure why. Sometimes the flag is set in a signal handler, where it isn't safe to use mutex/notify operations anyway, and nobody thought hard enough about making those wakups reliable. But those patterns lead to a race hazard with wait conditions. The article goes on to explain that kill_flag should be part of the data protected by the condition's mutex. And then there's no need to make it atomic. After seeing that, it might be a surprise to find kill_flag doesn't have to be protected by the mutex after all! That intuition that it can go outside was correct. It just needs a little ordering. The following code will also avoid the race hazard: // Notify all workers that they need to die right now. m_kill_flag = true; // Acquire and release the mutex to ensure condvar waiters reliably see all state changes. { std::unique_lock<std::mutex> lock(m_mutex); } // Wake all sleeping condvar waiters. m_has_work.notify_all(); I would not recommend this for the situation in the article. But you can see how it generalises, for example you might have a global kill flag or memory statistic that's used for many different things, protected by different mutexes.