Are “data races” and “race condition” actually the same thing in context of concurrent programming

Question

I often find these terms being used in context of concurrent programming . Are they the same thing or different ?

Answer 1

According to Wikipedia, the term "race condition" has been in use since the days of the first electronic logic gates. In the context of Java, a race condition can pertain to any resource, such as a file, network connection, a thread from a thread pool, etc.

The term "data race" is best reserved for its specific meaning defined by the JLS.

The most interesting case is a race condition that is very similar to a data race, but still isn't one, like in this simple example:

class Race {
  static volatile int i;
  static int uniqueInt() { return i++; }
}

Since i is volatile, there is no data race; however, from the program correctness standpoint there is a race condition due to the non-atomicity of the two operations: read i, write i+1. Multiple threads may receive the same value from uniqueInt.