Race-Conditions on Rafiul Alam

Go Concurrency Pattern: The Ticket Seller

Wed, 05 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

← Bank Account Drama | Series Overview | Login Counter →

The Problem: Selling Tickets That Don’t Exist

A concert has 1,000 tickets. Multiple goroutines handle sales concurrently. Each seller checks if tickets remain, and if yes, decrements the count and sells one. Sounds simple, right?

Two sellers check simultaneously. Both see “1 ticket remaining.” Both sell. You’ve just sold ticket number -1. Congratulations, you’ve discovered the check-then-act race condition, one of the most common concurrency bugs in the wild.

Go Concurrency Pattern: The Bank Account Drama

Sat, 18 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

← Login Counter | Series Overview | Ticket Seller →

The Problem: Money Vanishing Into Thin Air

Two people share a bank account with $100. Both check the balance at the same time, see $100, and both withdraw $100. The bank just lost $100. This isn’t a hypothetical-race conditions in financial systems have caused real monetary losses.

The bank account drama illustrates the fundamental challenge of concurrent programming: read-modify-write operations are not atomic. What seems like a simple operation actually involves multiple steps, and when multiple goroutines execute these steps concurrently, chaos ensues.

Go Memory Model Explained

Tue, 25 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Deep dive into Go's memory model, happens-before relationships, memory visibility guarantees, and what really happens with goroutines and shared memory.