Are Go locks/mutex not the same as ordinary locks/mutexes?

[Roger Alsing]

Coming from C++/C# background where locks/mutexes are considered evil due to blocking threads.

Due to how the Go goroutine scheduler works, are the Go counterpart of those primitives "different"?

Should I see the Go variants of these primitives more like yield points where the execution of a goroutine yields to let other goroutines run.

And thus not resulting in the same resource code/weight as the primitives has in other languages?

[Ian Lance Taylor]

Yes. A Go sync.Mutex blocks a goroutine, not a thread. Goroutines
are lighter weight than threads--they are basically just a stack.

Ian

[adon...@google.com]

To elaborate: the key difference as it relates to your question is not really the size of the goroutine data structure or stack, but that a goroutine yield operation is usually handled entirely in user mode by the Go scheduler, avoiding execution of the the kernel's thread scheduler and a heavyweight context switch.