The Lock interface

Let’s talk about the Lock interface. This is an alternative to the synchronized keyword for handling concurrency control. While synchronized helps us achieve thread safety, it also introduces some drawbacks:

• Threads are blocked while waiting for a lock, potentially wasting processing time
• There’s no mechanism to check whether a lock is available or to time out if a lock is held for too long

If you need to overcome these limitations, you can use the built-in Lock interface with implementations that offer more control over synchronization. We will discuss one of the most common implementations: ReentrantLock.

ReentrantLock

The ReentrantLock class is a popular implementation of the Lock interface. ReentrantLock is used to protect a section of code similar to synchronized but provides additional features through its methods:

• lock(): This method locks the lock
• unlock(): This method releases the lock
• tryLock(): This...