Master Golang: Atomic Counters

The primary mechanism for managing state in Go is communication over channels. We saw this for example with worker pools. There are a few other options for managing state though. Here we’ll look at using the sync/atomic package for atomic counters accessed by multiple goroutines.

 
package main

import (
    "fmt"
    "sync"
    "sync/atomic"
)

func main() {

We’ll use an unsigned integer to represent our (always-positive) counter.

 
    var ops uint64

A WaitGroup will help us wait for all goroutines to finish their work.

 
    var wg sync.WaitGroup

We’ll start 50 goroutines that each increment the counter exactly 1000 times.

 
    for i := 0; i < 50; i++ {
        wg.Add(1)

To atomically increment the counter we use AddUint64, giving it the memory address of our ops counter with the & syntax.

 
        go func() {
            for c := 0; c < 1000; c++ {

                atomic.AddUint64(&ops, 1)
            }
            wg.Done()
        }()
    }

Wait until all the goroutines are done.

 
    wg.Wait()

It’s safe to access ops now because we know no other goroutine is writing to it. Reading atomics safely while they are being updated is also possible, using functions like atomic.LoadUint64.

 
    fmt.Println("ops:", ops)
}

We expect to get exactly 50,000 operations. Had we used the non-atomic ops++ to increment the counter, we’d likely get a different number, changing between runs, because the goroutines would interfere with each other. Moreover, we’d get data race failures when running with the -race flag.

 
$ go run atomic-counters.go
ops: 50000

Next we’ll look at mutexes, another tool for managing state.

Next example: Mutexes.

Gratitude to Mark McGranaghan and Eli Bendersky