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Advanced Techniques in Go Programming

The sync.RWMutex Type

Explore how Go's sync.RWMutex enhances concurrency control by allowing multiple simultaneous readers while restricting write access. Understand the use of RLock, RUnlock, Lock, and Unlock methods to safely manage shared resources and prevent race conditions in concurrent programs.

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The sync.RWMutex data type

The sync.RWMutex data type is an improved version of sync.Mutex and is defined in the rwmutex.go file of the sync directory of the Go Standard library as follows:

Go (1.19.0)
type RWMutex struct {
    w Mutex
    writerSem uint32
    readerSem uint32
    readerCount int32
    readerWait int32
}

In other words, sync.RWMutex is based on sync.Mutex with the necessary additions and improvements. So, we might ask, how does sync.RWMutex improve sync.Mutex ...