What is a race condition?

A race condition is a situation in multithreaded or distributed systems where the outcome of a program depends on the unpredictable order of operations. It usually occurs when multiple threads or processes access shared resources simultaneously without proper synchronization.

For example, if two threads try to increment a shared counter at the same time, and the read and write operations are not protected, the final value may be incorrect. This can lead to errors, hard-to-detect bugs, and unstable program behavior.