Rust marks cross-thread shared memory as immutable in the general case, and allows you to define your own shared mutability constructs out of primitives like mutexes, atomics, and UnsafeCell. As a result you don't get rope to hang yourself with
by default, but atomic orderings are more than enough rope to devise incorrect synchronizations (
especially with more than 2 threads or memory locations). To quote an earlier post of mine:
In terms of shared-memory threading concurrency, Send and Sync, and the distinction between &T and &Mutex<T> and &mut T, were a revelation when I first learned them. It was a principled approach to shared-memory threading, with Send/Sync banning nearly all of the confusing and buggy entangled-state codebases I've seen and continue to see in C++ (much to my frustration and exasperation), and &Mutex<T> providing a cleaner alternative design (there's an excellent article on its design at http://cliffle.com/blog/rust-mutexes/).
My favorite simple concurrent data structure is https://docs.rs/triple_buffer/latest/triple_buffer/struct.Tr.... It beautifully demonstrates how you can achieve principled shared mutability, by defining two "handle" types (living on different threads), each carrying thread-local state (not TLS) and a pointer to shared memory, and only allowing each handle to access shared memory in a particular way. This statically prevents one thread from calling a method intended to run on another thread, or accessing fields local to another thread (since the methods and fields now live on the other handle). It also demonstrates the complexity of reasoning about lock-free algorithms (https://github.com/HadrienG2/triple-buffer/issues/14).
I find that writing C++ code the Rust way eliminates data races practically as effectively as writing Rust code upfront, but C++ makes the Rust way of thread-safe code extra work (no Mutex<T> unless you make one yourself, and you have to simulate &(T: Sync) yourself using T const* coupled with mutable atomic/mutex fields), whereas the happy path of threaded C++ (raw non-Arc pointers to shared mutable memory) leads to pervasive data races caused by missing or incorrect mutex locking or atomic synchronization.