The Go race detector

The Go race detector was added to Go so that developers can detect race conditions. As we mentioned in Chapter 18, Concurrent Work, you can use goroutines to run parts of your code concurrently. However, even experienced programmers might make a mistake that allows different goroutines to access the same resource at the same time. This is called a race condition. A race condition is problematic because one goroutine can edit the resource in the middle of another reading it, meaning the resource could be corrupted. While Go has made concurrency a first-class citizen in the language, the mechanisms for concurrent code do not prevent race conditions. Also, due to the inherent nature of concurrency, a race condition might stay hidden until long after your code has been deployed. This also means they tend to be transient, making them devilishly difficult to debug and fix. This is why the Go race detector was created.

This tool works by using an algorithm that detects...