Practical uses of atomics

Here are a few examples of using atomics. These are simple race-free uses of atomics in different scenarios.

Counters

Atomics can be used as efficient concurrency-safe counters. The following program creates many goroutines, each of which will add 1 to the shared counter. Another goroutine loops until the counter reaches 10000. Because of the use of atomics here, this program is race-free, and it will always terminate by eventually printing 10000:

var count int64
func main() {
     for i := 0; i < 10000; i++ {
          go func() {
               atomic.AddInt64(&count, 1)
               }()
          }
     for {
     &...