Mutex and Lock Internals in Golang

In modern software development, the concept of concurrency pertains to a program’s ability to execute multiple tasks or operations simultaneously. This enables efficient utilization of system resources and enhanced performance. A standout feature of the Go programming language (Golang) is its exceptional support for concurrency. However, concurrent systems introduce challenges that require careful handling. One such challenge arises when multiple resources attempt to access and modify shared resources concurrently, leading to unpredictable and erroneous behavior. <h2>How to safeguard critical sections:</h2> To tackle this issue, the concept of locks was introduced. Locks are used to safeguard critical sections of code where shared resources are accessed. They ensure that only one thread can access the protected resource at any given time. In Golang, we leverage goroutines, which are lightweight threads. The scheduling of these goroutines is managed by the Go runtime scheduler. While delving deeply into the intricacies of the Go runtime scheduler is beyond the scope of this article, you can refer to <a href="https://medium.com/@ravikumar19997/exploring-concurrency-threads-and-goroutines-88edbf3422df" rel="noopener">this</a> article for a more depth understanding of the Go runtime scheduler. In this article, we’ll start by exploring the fundamentals of locks. We’ll discuss how to create locks when needed. After that, we’ll delve into various locking strategies. Finally, we’ll take a deep dive into the Go mutex. I kindly ask you all to stay with me until the end of the article. Lock In Golang: In Go the unit of concurrency is goroutine, and goroutines are conceptually very similar to regular threads. You use them just like you use threads in a language like Java or C++, but the big difference is that they are user space. They are run and managed entirely by the Go runtime and not by the operating system. They’re created and scheduled by the runtime. Like with regular threads, when you have two goroutines accessing a shared memory location, that access needs to be synchronized. You can synchronize it using Go’s lock implementation, the implementation we’ll be looking at today, the sync.Mutex. The Mutex is a blocking non-recursive lock, so, there are no try acquire semantics. If a goroutine tries to acquire a lock and it can’t get it, it will block. <a href="https://blog.stackademic.com/mutex-internals-in-golang-1624749f35a6">Read More</a>