sync.Mutex
We've seen how channels are great for communication among goroutines.
But what if we don't need communication? What if we just want to make sure only
one goroutine can access a variable at a time to avoid conflicts?
This concept is called mutual exclusion, and the conventional name for the data structure that provides it is mutex.
Go's standard library provides mutual exclusion with
sync.Mutex
and its two methods:
We can define a block of code to be executed in mutual exclusion by surrounding it
with a call to Lock
and Unlock
as shown on the Inc
method.
We can also use defer
to ensure the mutex will be unlocked as in the Value
method.