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Unexpected behavior when using `Rc` with `RefCell` in a Rust multi-threaded context

👀 Views: 75 đŸ’Ŧ Answers: 1 📅 Created: 2025-06-01
rust multithreading rc refcell arc Rust

I'm trying to configure I'm experimenting with I'm trying to debug Could someone explain Does anyone know how to I'm encountering an issue while trying to share a mutable state across threads using `Rc<RefCell<T>>`. My intention is to share a counter across multiple threads, incrementing its value every time a thread accesses it. However, I'm getting a runtime panic with the message `borrow of borrowed data occurs here` when trying to mutate the value. I attempted the following implementation using the `std::thread` module to spawn multiple threads: ```rust use std::rc::Rc; use std::cell::RefCell; use std::thread; fn main() { let counter = Rc::new(RefCell::new(0)); let mut handles = vec![]; for _ in 0..10 { let counter_clone = Rc::clone(&counter); let handle = thread::spawn(move || { for _ in 0..1000 { let mut num = counter_clone.borrow_mut(); *num += 1; } }); handles.push(handle); } for handle in handles { handle.join().unwrap(); } println!("Final counter value: {}", *counter.borrow()); } ``` This approach works fine in a single-threaded context, but when I try to run it with multiple threads, I face the aforementioned panic. I understand that `Rc` is not thread-safe, and that's likely part of the issue, but I haven't found a straightforward way to adapt my code. I've tried replacing `Rc` with `Arc`, but I still ran into borrowing issues. Is there a recommended pattern for sharing mutable state in a thread-safe manner using `RefCell`? Should I be using a different synchronization primitive altogether? Any guidance on best practices for this scenario would be greatly appreciated. I'm working with Rust in a Docker container on Ubuntu 20.04. What are your experiences with this? The stack includes Rust and several other technologies. Is this even possible? I recently upgraded to Rust 3.10. Thanks in advance! This issue appeared after updating to Rust latest.