Rust for C-Programmers

22.9 Comparing Rust’s Concurrency to C/C++

C programmers often use POSIX threads, while C++ provides <thread>, <mutex>, <condition_variable>, <atomic>, and libraries such as OpenMP for parallelism. These tools are powerful but leave concurrency safety largely up to the programmer, risking data races or undefined behavior.

Rust’s ownership rules, together with the Send and Sync auto-traits, make data races practically impossible unless you opt into unsafe. Libraries like Rayon offer high-level parallelism similar to OpenMP but with stronger compile-time safety guarantees.