Understanding Atomic Operations in Go
Atomic operations in Go provide a lightweight way to handle concurrent access to simple variables without the overhead of mutexes or the complexity of channels. They also perform significantly better in certain scenarios. While they’re not a silver bullet for all concurrency needs, atomic operations excel in specific scenarios where you need fast, simple synchronization. In this article, we’ll look at: what atomic operations are, how they’re implemented at the instruction set level, when to use them and when not to, as well as some common patterns for using them in code. By the end of reading you should understand when to reach for this valuable concurrency tool instead of better known tools like the sync package, goroutines, and channels. ...