A million ways to die from a data race in Go
2 days ago
- #Concurrency
- #Data Races
- #Go
- Go's ease of writing concurrent programs comes with risks of data races.
- Data races in Go can lead to inconsistent values or arbitrary memory corruption.
- Common data race scenarios include shared variable capture in closures, concurrent modification of HTTP client settings, and incorrect mutex usage.
- Solutions include using local variables in closures, separate HTTP clients for concurrent requests, and proper mutex alignment with data lifetimes.
- The Go race detector is useful but doesn't catch all data races; comprehensive testing with race detection is recommended.
- Suggestions for improving Go include adding const support, compiler-generated Clone functions, and better mutex APIs.
- Best practices for avoiding data races include using immutable types, leveraging sync.Map, and ensuring proper synchronization.