What does a race condition mean in multithreaded programming?

Race condition in multithreaded programming is a situation where the outcome of a program depends on the unpredictable order of thread execution.

If multiple threads access a shared resource (such as a variable or file) simultaneously without proper synchronization, errors can occur because operations may be interrupted and interleaved.

For example, if two threads increment a counter simultaneously without locks, the final value may be less than expected because read and write operations overlap.

To prevent race conditions, synchronization mechanisms such as mutexes, semaphores, and atomic operations are used.

Example in Dart (Flutter):

int counter = 0;

void increment() {
  // Without synchronization, two threads might read and write counter simultaneously
  counter = counter + 1;
}

In a multithreaded environment, synchronization is necessary to ensure correct value updates.