Philosophers

Overview

The Philosophers project is a C language implementation inspired by the classic Dining Philosophers problem—an example often used in computer science for illustrating synchronization, concurrency, and deadlock avoidance.

Language Composition

• C (84.9%): Core logic, thread management, synchronization.
• Makefile (15.1%): Build instructions and project automation.

Problem Statement

The Dining Philosophers problem models a scenario where several philosophers sit at a table with forks between them. Each philosopher alternates between thinking and eating. To eat, a philosopher must acquire both adjacent forks. The challenge is to design a system that prevents deadlocks and ensures that every philosopher can eat and think without starvation.

Features

• Thread-based simulation of philosophers’ actions.
• Solutions for preventing deadlocks and starvation.
• Customizable simulation parameters (number of philosophers, timings).
• Clean, modular C codebase.

Build & Run

Requirements

• GCC or compatible C compiler
• Make

Build

make

Usage

./philosophers <number_of_philosophers> <time_to_die> <time_to_eat> <time_to_sleep> [number_of_times_each_philosopher_must_eat]

• number_of_philosophers: Number of philosophers at the table
• time_to_die: Time (ms) before a philosopher dies if not eating
• time_to_eat: Eating duration (ms)
• time_to_sleep: Sleeping duration (ms)
• [number_of_times_each_philosopher_must_eat]: (Optional) simulation stops when all have eaten this many times

Example

./philosophers 5 800 200 200

Project Structure

• src/ — C source files for the simulation logic
• include/ — Header files
• Makefile — Build automation

Contributing

Feel free to fork, open issues, or submit PRs for improvements and bug fixes.

License

This project follows the license provided in the repository.

Author

• Denionline