Go is a language well known for it’s concurrency primitives.

While Go has some really nice features making it so easy for developers to create concurrent applications, not all of the types in Go are safe for concurrent use.

For instance two of the most commonly used types in Go - slice and map - cannot be used safely from multiple goroutines without the risk of having a race condition.

On other hand using the basic synchronization primitives which Go provides to us we can create our own thread safe types.

In this post we will see how to create our own slice and map types which can be safely shared between multiple goroutines.

In order to do that we need to ensure that access to the shared data is protected by a mutex.

What a mutex does is basically to acquire a lock when it needs to access our concurrent slice or map. While holding the lock a goroutine can read and/or write to the shared data protected by the mutex.

A mutex lock can be acquired by a single goroutine at a time, and if other goroutine needs access to the same shared data it waits until the lock has been released by the goroutine holding the lock.

Forgetting to release the lock or improper use of it often leads to deadlocks. That is why we need to make sure we always release the mutex lock once we are done with it.

Let’s start now by creating our concurrent types. We will start with creating the type for concurrent slice and then make our way to the concurrent map as well.

// Slice type that can be safely shared between goroutines
type ConcurrentSlice struct {
	sync.RWMutex
	items []interface{}
}

// Concurrent slice item
type ConcurrentSliceItem struct {
	Index int
	Value interface{}
}

In order to protect access to the data in our slice we have used a sync.RWMutex using composition.

The internal slice ConcurrentSlice.items that we use for storing slice items is of type interface{} which allows us to use this concurrent slice to store any data into it.

We have also created a ConcurrentSliceItem type which we will use later on when we need to return an item from our concurrent slice while iterating over it using the builtin keyword range.

Now, let’s implement a method which allows us to add new items to the slice.

// Appends an item to the concurrent slice
func (cs *ConcurrentSlice) Append(item interface{}) {
	cs.Lock()
	defer cs.Unlock()

	cs.items = append(cs.items, item)
}

What this method does is to acquire the mutex lock and append the item we have passed to it and after that it releases the lock. Simple enough.

Now let’s implement a method that iterates over our slice items.

// Iterates over the items in the concurrent slice
// Each item is sent over a channel, so that
// we can iterate over the slice using the builin range keyword
func (cs *ConcurrentSlice) Iter() <-chan ConcurrentSliceItem {
	c := make(chan ConcurrentSliceItem)

	f := func() {
		cs.Lock()
		defer cs.Unlock()
		for index, value := range cs.items {
			c <- ConcurrentSliceItem{index, value}
		}
		close(c)
	}
	go f()

	return c
}

The ConcurrentSlice.Iter() method returns a channel over which ConcurrentSliceItem items are being sent to.

This allows us to use the builtin range keyword and iterate over the items in our concurrent slice.

It is also worth noting that since our slice items are stored as interface{} in order to retrieve the underlying values we need to use type assertions.

Let’s create now the concurrent map type.

// Map type that can be safely shared between
// goroutines that require read/write access to a map
type ConcurrentMap struct {
	sync.RWMutex
	items map[string]interface{}
}

// Concurrent map item
type ConcurrentMapItem struct {
	Key   string
	Value interface{}
}

Similar to the ConcurrentSlice type above we are using composition to embed the sync.RWMutex in our ConcurrentMap type.

When we retrieve items from the map we will be returning a ConcurrentMapItem type which contains the map item key and value.

Let’s implement a method for setting a new key in our concurrent map.

// Sets a key in a concurrent map
func (cm *ConcurrentMap) Set(key string, value interface{}) {
	cm.Lock()
	defer cm.Unlock()

	cm.items[key] = value
}

And now we implement the method for retrieving a key from the map:

// Gets a key from a concurrent map
func (cm *ConcurrentMap) Get(key string) (interface{}, bool) {
	cm.Lock()
	defer cm.Unlock()

	value, ok := cm.items[key]

	return value, ok
}

The result of ConcurrentMap.Get() method would return the value of requested key and a boolean indicating whether the key is present or not in the map.

And finally let’s implement a method to iterate over all items in the concurrent map.

// Iterates over the items in a concurrent map
// Each item is sent over a channel, so that
// we can iterate over the map using the builtin range keyword
func (cm *ConcurrentMap) Iter() <-chan ConcurrentMapItem {
	c := make(chan ConcurrentMapItem)

	f := func() {
		cm.Lock()
		defer cm.Unlock()

		for k, v := range cm.items {
			c <- ConcurrentMapItem{k, v}
		}
		close(c)
	}
	go f()

	return c
}

Above method returns a channel over which ConcurrentMapItem items are being sent to and we can use the builtin range keyword to iterate over all items in the map.

Similar to the concurrent slices and the fact that we have used interface{} to store the map values we need to use type assertions in order to retrieve the underlying value.

You can also find the code used in this post in the gru.utils package in Github.