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Spin-lock implementation

Submitted by: @import:stackexchange-codereview··
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implementationspinlock

Problem

I'm working on a project where a spinlock is more appropriate than a mutex, and after few tries I came up with:

type SpinLock uint32

func (sl *SpinLock) Lock() {
    for !atomic.CompareAndSwapUint32((*uint32)(sl), 0, 1) {
        runtime.Gosched() //without this it locks up on GOMAXPROCS > 1
    }
}

func (sl *SpinLock) Unlock() {
    atomic.StoreUint32((*uint32)(sl), 0)
}


It works fine, and it's even a little bit faster than sync.Mutex, and 2x the speed of sync.RWMutex.

➜ go test -bench=. -benchmem -v -cpu 4
BenchmarkSpinL-4            2000           1078798 ns/op           33923 B/op       2006 allocs/op
BenchmarkMutex-4            2000           1195814 ns/op           32781 B/op       2002 allocs/o
BenchmarkRWMutex-4          1000           2352117 ns/op           78253 B/op       2147 allocs/op


The test uses multi readers / writers to a map[int]*struct{int, int}. Running it with -race doesn't detect any data races, either.

But I have that nagging feeling that I forgot something, so I'm wondering if my implementation is correct?

Solution

The only weak point is that the implementation is not copy safe nor there exist mechanism for ensuring copy protection. I would hide its underlying type and return as sync.Locker, so it can't be mis-used:

type spinLock uint32

func (sl *spinLock) Lock() {
    for !atomic.CompareAndSwapUint32((*uint32)(sl), 0, 1) {
        runtime.Gosched() //without this it locks up on GOMAXPROCS > 1
    }
}

func (sl *spinLock) Unlock() {
    atomic.StoreUint32((*uint32)(sl), 0)
}

func SpinLock() sync.Locker {
    return &spinLock{}
}


An alternative I've seen in sync.Cond is to embed an auxiliary type for copy-protection, although it would complicate the implementation unnecessary.

Code Snippets

type spinLock uint32

func (sl *spinLock) Lock() {
    for !atomic.CompareAndSwapUint32((*uint32)(sl), 0, 1) {
        runtime.Gosched() //without this it locks up on GOMAXPROCS > 1
    }
}

func (sl *spinLock) Unlock() {
    atomic.StoreUint32((*uint32)(sl), 0)
}

func SpinLock() sync.Locker {
    return &spinLock{}
}

Context

StackExchange Code Review Q#60332, answer score: 7

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