Atomicity, race, deadlocks, and starvation

To write and analyze concurrent programs successfully, you have to be aware of some key concepts: atomicity, race, deadlocks, and starvation. Atomicity is a property you have to carefully exploit for safe and correct operation. Race is a natural condition related to the timing of events in a concurrent system, and can create irreproducible subtle bugs. You have to avoid deadlocks at all costs. Starvation is usually related to scheduling algorithms, but can also be caused by bugs in the program.

A race condition is a condition in which the outcome of a program depends on the sequence or timing of concurrent executions. A race condition is a bug when at least one of the outcomes is undesirable. Consider the following data type representing a bank account:

type Account struct {
     Balance int
}
func (acct *Account) Withdraw(amt int) error {
     if acct.Balance < amt {
  ...