• A synchronization mechanism that avoids the use of lock primitives while multiple threads concurrently read and update elements that are linked through pointers and that belong to shared data structures (e.g., linked lists, trees, or hash tables). Whenever a thread is inserting or deleting elements of data structures in shared memory, all readers are guaranteed to see and traverse either the older or the new structure, therefore avoiding inconsistencies (e.g., dereferencing null pointers). RCU is used when performance of reads is crucial, and it is an example of a space–time tradeoff. ← Wikipedia

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