Search⌘ K
AI Features
Home
Courses
Mastering Concurrency in Go

Mutex

Explore how mutexes in Go synchronize access to critical sections of shared data by locking and unlocking resources. Understand the importance of preventing race conditions in concurrent programming. This lesson explains the use of sync.Mutex with practical examples and introduces RWMutex for enhanced control over read and write operations.

We'll cover the following...

A mutex, or a mutual exclusion prevents other processes from entering a critical section of data while a process occupies it.

We import mutex from the sync package in Go. sync.mutex has two methods:

  • .Lock() : acquires/holds the lock
  • .Unlock(): releases the lock
Go (1.6.2)
var myMutex sync.Mutex
myMutex.Lock()
//critical section 
myMutex.Unlock()

Critical Section

Let’s continue on our example of deposit/withdraw balance ...