Mastering Go - Second Edition

Catching race conditions

A data race condition is a situation where two or more running elements, such as threads and goroutines, try to take control of or modify a shared resource or a variable of a program. Strictly speaking, a data race occurs when two or more instructions access the same memory address, where at least one of them performs a write operation. If all operations are read operations, then there is no race condition.

Using the -race flag when running or building a Go source file will turn on the Go race detector, which will make the compiler create a modified version of a typical executable file. This modified version can record all access to shared variables as well as all synchronization events that take place, including ...