[Rust] Thread 4: Safe sharing the data between threads with Arc<T>

Arc<T> is a type like Rc<T> that is safe to use in concurrent situations. The a stands for atomic, meaning it’s an atomically reference counted type. Atomics are an additional kind of concurrency primitive that we won’t cover in detail here: see the standard library documentation for std::sync::atomic for more details. At this point, you just need to know that atomics work like primitive types but are safe to share across threads.

You might then wonder why all primitive types aren’t atomic and why standard library types aren’t implemented to use Arc<T> by default. The reason is that thread safety comes with a performance penalty that you only want to pay when you really need to. If you’re just performing operations on values within a single thread, your code can run faster if it doesn’t have to enforce the guarantees atomics provide.

 More to read: https://doc.rust-lang.org/stable/book/ch16-03-shared-state.html#atomic-reference-counting-with-arct

// In this exercise, we are given a Vec of u32 called "numbers" with values
// ranging from 0 to 99 -- [ 0, 1, 2, ..., 98, 99 ] We would like to use this
// set of numbers within 8 different threads simultaneously. Each thread is
// going to get the sum of every eighth value, with an offset.
//
// The first thread (offset 0), will sum 0, 8, 16, ...
// The second thread (offset 1), will sum 1, 9, 17, ...
// The third thread (offset 2), will sum 2, 10, 18, ...
// ...
// The eighth thread (offset 7), will sum 7, 15, 23, ...
//
// Because we are using threads, our values need to be thread-safe.  Therefore,
// we are using Arc.  We need to make a change in each of the two TODOs.
//
// Make this code compile by filling in a value for `shared_numbers` where the
// first TODO comment is, and create an initial binding for `child_numbers`
// where the second TODO comment is. Try not to create any copies of the
// `numbers` Vec!
//
// Execute `rustlings hint arc1` or use the `hint` watch subcommand for a hint.

#![forbid(unused_imports)] // Do not change this, (or the next) line.
use std::sync::Arc;
use std::thread;

fn main() {
    let numbers: Vec<_> = (0..100u32).collect();
    let shared_numbers = Arc::new(numbers);
    let mut joinhandles = Vec::new();

    for offset in 0..8 {
        let child_numbers = // shared_numbers.clone();
        joinhandles.push(thread::spawn(move || {
            let sum: u32 = child_numbers.iter().filter(|&&n| n % 8 == offset).sum();
            println!("Sum of offset {} is {}", offset, sum);
        }));
    }
    for handle in joinhandles.into_iter() {
        handle.join().unwrap();
    }
}