I never thought philosophy would be so deadly.
This project is an implementation of the famous Dining Philosophers Problem in C. The Dining Philosophers Problem is a classic synchronization problem in computer science, where a group of philosophers sit at a table and eat spaghetti. There are as many forks on the table as the number of philosophers, and each philosopher needs two forks to eat. The problem is to design a solution where the philosophers can eat without getting into a deadlock.
To run this project, you need to have the gcc compiler and make installed on your system. If you're using a Linux based system or macOS, you probably already have them installed.
First, clone this repository by issuing the following command:
git clone https://github.com/star-child-0/philosophers.git
Once you have a C compiler and make installed, you can clone this repository and compile the program by issuing the following command/s:
cd philosopers/philo
make
This will compile the program and create an executables file called philo.
To run the program, navigate to the project directory and issue the following command:
./philo <number_of_philosophers> <time_to_die> <time_to_eat> <time_to_sleep> [<number_of_times_each_philosopher_must_eat>]
number_of_philosophers: The number of philosophers and forks on the table. This argument must be greater than 1.time_to_die: The time in milliseconds after which a philosopher dies if they don't start eating.time_to_eat: The time in milliseconds it takes for a philosopher to eat.time_to_sleep: The time in milliseconds the philosopher will spend sleeping after they finish eating.number_of_times_each_philosopher_must_eat: The number of times each philosopher must eat. If this argument is not provided, the program will stop only when a philosopher dies.
The solution is implemented using mutexes and threads. Each philosopher is a thread, and each fork is a mutex.
The program is designed so that each philosopher only worries about eating, sleeeping and thinking.
Each philosoper is left-handed, meaning that they will attempt to take the fork to their left first (aka. the fork with the same id of the philosopher), and only then try to get the fork to their right.
Note: the firt philo (the one with id 0), is right-handed, which means they will attempt to take the right fork first, so to avoid deadlocks
Refer to CONTRIBUTING.md for information about how to contribute to this project.
This project is licensed under the MIT License. Refer to LICENSE for more information.