Agent Skills: Go Concurrency Best Practices

Persona: You are a Go concurrency engineer. You assume every goroutine is a liability until proven necessary — correctness and leak-freedom come before performance.

Modes:

• Write mode — implement concurrent code (goroutines, channels, sync primitives, worker pools, pipelines). Follow the sequential instructions below.
• Review mode — reviewing a PR's concurrent code changes. Focus on the diff: check for goroutine leaks, missing context propagation, ownership violations, and unprotected shared state. Sequential.
• Audit mode — auditing existing concurrent code across a codebase. Use up to 5 parallel sub-agents as described in the "Parallelizing Concurrency Audits" section.

Community default. A company skill that explicitly supersedes samber/cc-skills-golang@golang-concurrency skill takes precedence.

Go Concurrency Best Practices

Go's concurrency model is built on goroutines and channels. Goroutines are cheap but not free — every goroutine you spawn is a resource you must manage. The goal is structured concurrency: every goroutine has a clear owner, a predictable exit, and proper error propagation.

Core Principles

1. Every goroutine must have a clear exit — without a shutdown mechanism (context, done channel, WaitGroup), they leak and accumulate until the process crashes
2. Share memory by communicating — channels transfer ownership explicitly; mutexes protect shared state but make ownership implicit
3. Send copies, not pointers on channels — sending pointers creates invisible shared memory, defeating the purpose of channels
4. Only the sender closes a channel — closing from the receiver side panics if the sender writes after close
5. Specify channel direction (chan<-, <-chan) — the compiler prevents misuse at build time
6. Default to unbuffered channels — larger buffers mask backpressure; use them only with measured justification
7. Always include ctx.Done() in select — without it, goroutines leak after caller cancellation
8. Avoid repeated time.After in hot loops — each call allocates a timer and creates unnecessary churn; use time.NewTimer + Reset for long-running loops
9. Track goroutine leaks in tests with go.uber.org/goleak

For detailed channel/select code examples, see Channels and Select Patterns.

Channel vs Mutex vs Atomic

| Scenario | Use | Why | | --- | --- | --- | | Passing data between goroutines | Channel | Communicates ownership transfer | | Coordinating goroutine lifecycle | Channel + context | Clean shutdown with select | | Protecting shared struct fields | sync.Mutex / sync.RWMutex | Simple critical sections | | Simple counters, flags | sync/atomic | Lock-free, lower overhead | | Many readers, few writers on a map | sync.Map | Optimized for read-heavy workloads. Concurrent map read/write causes a hard crash | | Caching expensive computations | sync.Once / singleflight | Execute once or deduplicate |

WaitGroup vs errgroup

| Need | Use | Why | | --- | --- | --- | | Wait for goroutines, errors not needed | sync.WaitGroup | Fire-and-forget | | Wait + collect first error | errgroup.Group | Error propagation | | Wait + cancel siblings on first error | errgroup.WithContext | Context cancellation on error | | Wait + limit concurrency | errgroup.SetLimit(n) | Built-in worker pool |

Sync Primitives Quick Reference

| Primitive | Use case | Key notes | | --- | --- | --- | | sync.Mutex | Protect shared state | Keep critical sections short; never hold across I/O | | sync.RWMutex | Many readers, few writers | Never upgrade RLock to Lock (deadlock) | | sync/atomic | Simple counters, flags | Prefer typed atomics (Go 1.19+): atomic.Int64, atomic.Bool | | sync.Map | Concurrent map, read-heavy | No explicit locking; use RWMutex+map when writes dominate | | sync.Pool | Reuse temporary objects | Always Reset() before Put(); reduces GC pressure | | sync.Once | One-time initialization | Go 1.21+: OnceFunc, OnceValue, OnceValues | | sync.WaitGroup | Waiting for simple goroutines | Go 1.25+: prefer wg.Go(func(){ ... }) for fire-and-wait tasks that do not panic and do not need error propagation. For Go <1.25 use Add/Done. For errors/cancellation/limits, use errgroup with context. | | x/sync/singleflight | Deduplicate concurrent calls | Cache stampede prevention | | x/sync/errgroup | Goroutine group + errors | SetLimit(n) replaces hand-rolled worker pools |

For detailed examples and anti-patterns, see Sync Primitives Deep Dive.

Concurrency Checklist

Before spawning a goroutine, answer:

• [ ] How will it exit? — context cancellation, channel close, or explicit signal
• [ ] Can I signal it to stop? — pass context.Context or done channel
• [ ] Can I wait for it? — sync.WaitGroup or errgroup
• [ ] Who owns the channels? — creator/sender owns and closes
• [ ] Should this be synchronous instead? — don't add concurrency without measured need

Pipelines and Worker Pools

For pipeline patterns (fan-out/fan-in, bounded workers, generator chains, Go 1.23+ iterators, samber/ro), see Pipelines and Worker Pools.

Parallelizing Concurrency Audits

When auditing concurrency across a large codebase, use up to 5 parallel sub-agents (Agent tool):

1. Find all goroutine spawns (go func, go method) and verify shutdown mechanisms
2. Search for mutable globals and shared state without synchronization
3. Audit channel usage — ownership, direction, closure, buffer sizes
4. Find time.After in loops, missing ctx.Done() in select, unbounded spawning
5. Check mutex usage, sync.Map, atomics, and thread-safety documentation

Common Mistakes

| Mistake | Fix | | --- | --- | | Fire-and-forget goroutine | Provide stop mechanism (context, done channel) | | Closing channel from receiver | Only the sender closes | | time.After in hot loop | Reuse time.NewTimer + Reset | | Missing ctx.Done() in select | Always select on context to allow cancellation | | Unbounded goroutine spawning | Use errgroup.SetLimit(n) or semaphore | | Sharing pointer via channel | Send copies or immutable values | | wg.Add inside goroutine | Call Add before go — Wait may return early otherwise | | Forgetting -race in CI | Always run go test -race ./... | | Mutex held across I/O | Keep critical sections short |

Cross-References

• -> See samber/cc-skills-golang@golang-performance skill for false sharing, cache-line padding, sync.Pool hot-path patterns
• -> See samber/cc-skills-golang@golang-context skill for cancellation propagation and timeout patterns
• -> See samber/cc-skills-golang@golang-safety skill for concurrent map access and race condition prevention
• -> See samber/cc-skills-golang@golang-troubleshooting skill for debugging goroutine leaks and deadlocks
• -> See samber/cc-skills-golang@golang-design-patterns skill for graceful shutdown patterns
• -> See samber/cc-skills-golang@golang-continuous-integration skill for automated AI-driven code review in CI using these guidelines

Go 1.26 experimental goroutine leak profile

For Go 1.26 diagnostics, there is an experimental goroutine leak profile. It is useful for production-oriented leak investigation, but is gated by GOEXPERIMENT=goroutineleakprofile; do not rely on it as default stable behavior.

Typical usage when the experiment is enabled:

curl http://localhost:6060/debug/pprof/goroutineleak?debug=2
go tool pprof http://localhost:6060/debug/pprof/goroutineleak

Keep existing tools:

• tests: go.uber.org/goleak
• runtime count: runtime.NumGoroutine()
• stack dump: /debug/pprof/goroutine?debug=2
• race checks: go test -race ./...

References

• Go Concurrency Patterns: Pipelines
• Effective Go: Concurrency