Fwiw "data race" != "race condition", confusing as that may be. A race condition is a blanket term for any nondeterministic bug resulting from differences in timing between independent, concurrent processes. A data race is a specific kind of race condition where reads/writes to the same value in machine memory step on each other's toes and lead to inconsistent behavior. The classic example is two threads that try to increment the same number but only one takes effect, because they both read the current value before either writes their new value (instead of one read/writing and then the other read/writing). I'm not really a C/++ programmer, though, so I only have a rough understanding of this topic. I don't know what a "benign data race" is, for example.