A standstill resulting from the opposition of two evenly matched forces; a stalemate or impasse.
The negotiation ended in deadlock, with neither party willing to compromise on the price.
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Computing, Engineering, Mathematics, Natural sciences, Physical sciences, Sciences An inability to continue due to two programs or devices each requiring a response from the other before completing an operation.
If synchronization is always performed in least-first order with respect to object tags, then situations can never arise in which one thread has the synchronization lock for x while waiting for y and another has the lock for y while waiting for x. Instead, they will both obtain the locks in the same order, thus avoiding this form of deadlock.2000, Douglas Lea, Concurrent Programming in Java, Addison-Wesley Professional, →ISBN, page 88:
A suspect was arrested on November 30 and charged with attempted murder. The evidence against him consisted of two jailhouse informers and an eyewitness who picked him out of a lineup after having identified a different man in an initial photo array. A jury ultimately convicted the suspect of assault after deadlocking twice in three days of deliberation.2001, Bernard E. Harcourt, chapter 6, in Illusion of Order:
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To bring to a state of deadlock.
Since we cannot solve this problem completely, it may sometimes be better to use explicit locks and risk deadlock if a thread exits unexpectedly. It may be better to have a deadlocked system than to have a corrupted system.2004, Scott Oaks, Henry Wong, Java Threads, O'Reilly Media, →ISBN, page 123: