Is it safe for more than one goroutine to print to stdout?

concurrency synchronization go goroutine
Taymon picture Taymon · Feb 4, 2013 · Viewed 10.8k times · Source

I have multiple goroutines in my program, each of which makes calls to fmt.Println without any explicit synchronization. Is this safe (i.e., will each line appear separately without data corruption), or do I need to create another goroutine with synchronization specifically to handle printing?

Answer

zzzz picture zzzz · Feb 4, 2013

No it's not safe even though you may not sometimes observe any troubles. IIRC, the fmt package tries to be on the safe side, so probably intermixing of some sort may occur but no process crash, hopefully.

This is an instance of a more universal Go documentation rule: Things are not safe for concurrent access unless specified otherwise or where obvious from context.

One can have a safe version of a nice subset of fmt.Print* functionality using the log package with some small initial setup.

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