Go Systems Programming

Using sync.Mutex

Mutex is an abbreviation for mutual exclusion; the Mutex variables are mainly used for thread synchronization and for protecting shared data when multiple writes can occur at the same time. A mutex works like a buffered channel of capacity 1 that allows at most one goroutine to access a shared variable at a time. This means that there is no way for two or more goroutines to try to update that variable simultaneously. Although this is a perfectly valid technique, the general Go community prefers to use the monitor goroutine technique presented in the previous section.

In order to use sync.Mutex, you will have to declare a sync.Mutex variable first. You can lock that variable using the Lock method and release it using the ...