Advanced Techniques in Go Programming/

...

/

The sync.RWMutex Type

The sync.RWMutex Type

Let’s learn about the sync.RWMutex data type, an enhanced version of sync.Mutex in the Go Standard library.

We'll cover the following...

The sync.RWMutex data type

The sync.RWMutex data type is an improved version of sync.Mutex and is defined in the rwmutex.go file of the sync directory of the Go Standard library as follows:

Press + to interact
type RWMutex struct {
    w Mutex
    writerSem uint32
    readerSem uint32
    readerCount int32
    readerWait int32
}

In other words, sync.RWMutex is based on sync.Mutex with the necessary additions and improvements. So, we might ask, how does sync.RWMutex improve sync.Mutex? Although a single function is allowed to perform write operations with a sync.RWMutex mutex, we can have multiple readers owning a sync.RWMutex mutex—this means that read operations are usually faster with sync.RWMutex ...