Mastering Go - Second Edition

The sync.Mutex type

The sync.Mutex type is the Go implementation of a mutex. Its definition, which can be found in the mutex.go file of the sync directory, is as follows:

// A Mutex is a mutual exclusion lock. 
// The zero value for a Mutex is an unlocked mutex. 
// 
// A Mutex must not be copied after first use. 
type Mutex struct { 
        state int32 
        sema  uint32 
} 

If you are interested in what code in the standard library is doing, remember that Go is completely open source and you can go and read it.

The definition of the sync.Mutex type is nothing extraordinary. All of the interesting work is done by the sync.Lock() and sync.Unlock() functions, which can lock and unlock a sync.Mutex mutex, respectively. Locking a mutex means that nobody else ...