Philosophers
Philosophers is a classic concurrency project at 42 based on the Dining Philosophers problem. The objective is to simulate philosophers who alternate between eating, thinking, and sleeping while competing for shared resources (forks). The project focuses on understanding multithreading, process synchronization, and timing constraints, highlighting the challenges of writing safe and efficient concurrent programs.
Client
Year
2025
Industry
Software Development
Role
Developer
Links
Challenge
The main challenge of the Philosophers project is preventing concurrency issues such as race conditions, deadlocks, and starvation. Each philosopher must access shared resources without causing the program to freeze or behave unpredictably. Managing precise timing, ensuring accurate state logging, and handling thread or process synchronization under strict constraints require careful coordination and deep attention to detail.
Solution
To address these challenges, I implemented a concurrency model using threads (and mutexes) to protect shared resources and synchronize philosopher actions. Each fork is guarded by a mutex to ensure exclusive access, while shared state and logging are carefully synchronized to avoid race conditions. Timing mechanisms ensure philosophers eat, sleep, and think within defined limits, and the simulation cleanly terminates when a philosopher dies or all meals are completed. The code is structured to be clear, safe, and efficient.
Impact
This project significantly improved my understanding of multithreading, synchronization primitives, and concurrent system design. It strengthened my ability to reason about parallel execution, identify subtle timing bugs, and write thread-safe code. Philosophers also reinforced best practices in debugging and designing reliable low-level systems.
Deliverables
A full simulation of the Dining Philosophers problem in C
Thread-based implementation with mutex synchronization
Accurate timing and state management
Protection against deadlocks and race conditions
Clean logging of philosopher states
Well-structured, norm-compliant code
