Go: Deadlock

A deadlock happens when a group of goroutines are waiting for each other and none of them is able to proceed.

Take a look at this simple example:

func main() {
        ch := make(chan int)
        ch <- 1
        fmt.Println(<-ch)
}

The program will get stuck on the channel send operation waiting forever for someone to read the value. Go is able to detect situations like this at runtime. Here is the output from our program:

fatal error: all goroutines are asleep - deadlock!

goroutine 1 [chan send]:
main.main()
        .../deadlock.go:7 +0x6c

Debugging tips

A goroutine can get stuck

• either because it's waiting for a channel or

• because it is waiting for one of the locks in the sync package.

Typical reasons are:

• No other goroutine has access to the channel or the lock, or

• A group of goroutines are waiting for each other and none of them is able to proceed. (This is the formal defintion of deadlock.)

Currently Go only detects when the program as a whole freezes, not when a subset of goroutines get stuck.

With channels it's often easy to figure out what caused a deadlock. Programs that make heavy use of mutexes can on the other hand be notoriously difficult to debug.