Dining Philosophers: Five Forks and a Deadlock

    The Classic Dining Philosophers Problem The Dining Philosophers problem is one of the most famous concurrency problems, introduced by Edsger Dijkstra in 1965. It beautifully illustrates the challenges of resource sharing and deadlock in concurrent systems. The Setup: Five philosophers sit around a circular table. Between each pair of philosophers is a single fork (5 forks total). Each philosopher needs two forks to eat - one from their left and one from their right. ...

    November 18, 2025 · 6 min · Rafiul Alam

    Go Concurrency Pattern: The Bank Account Drama

    ← Login Counter | Series Overview | Ticket Seller → The Problem: Money Vanishing Into Thin Air Two people share a bank account with $100. Both check the balance at the same time, see $100, and both withdraw $100. The bank just lost $100. This isn’t a hypothetical—race conditions in financial systems have caused real monetary losses. The bank account drama illustrates the fundamental challenge of concurrent programming: read-modify-write operations are not atomic. What seems like a simple operation actually involves multiple steps, and when multiple goroutines execute these steps concurrently, chaos ensues. ...

    January 18, 2025 · 7 min · Rafiul Alam