is concurrent write on stdout threadsafe?

Question

below code does not throw a data race

package main

import (
    "fmt"
    "os"
    "strings"
)

func main() {
    x := strings.Repeat(" ", 1024)
    go func() {
        for {
            fmt.Fprintf(os.Stdout, x+"aa\n")
        }
    }()

    go func() {
        for {
            fmt.Fprintf(os.Stdout, x+"bb\n")
        }
    }()

    go func() {
        for {
            fmt.Fprintf(os.Stdout, x+"cc\n")
        }
    }()

    go func() {
        for {
            fmt.Fprintf(os.Stdout, x+"dd\n")
        }
    }()

    <-make(chan bool)
}

I tried multiple length of data, with variant https://play.golang.org/p/29Cnwqj5K30

This post says it is not TS.

This mail does not really answer the question, or I did not understand.

Package documentation of os and fmt dont mention much about this. I admit i did not dig the source code of those two packages to find further explanations, they appear too complex to me.

What are the recommendations and their references ?

Answer 1

I'm not sure it would qualify as a definitive answer but I'll try to provide some insight.

The F*-functions of the fmt package merely state they take a value of a type implementing io.Writer interface and call Write on it. The functions themselves are safe for concurrent use — in the sense it's OK to call any number of fmt.Fwhaveter concurrently: the package itself is prepared for that, but when it comes to concurrently writing to the same value of a type implementing io.Writer, the question becomes more complex because supporting of an interface in Go does not state anything about the real type concurrency-wise.

In other words, the real point of where the concurrency may or may not be allowed is deferred to the "writer" which the functions of fmt write to. (One should also keep in mind that the fmt.*Print* functions are allowed to call Write on its destination any number of times during a single invocation, in a row, — as opposed to those provided by the stock package log.)

So, we basically have two cases:

• Custom implementations of io.Writer.
• Stock implementations of it, such as *os.File or wrappers around sockets produced by the functions of net package.

The first case is the simple one: whatever the implementor did.

The second case is harder: as I understand, the Go standard library's stance on this (albeit not clearly stated in the docs) in that the wrappers it provides around "things" provided by the OS—such as file descriptors and sockets—are reasonably "thin", and hence whatever semantics they implement, is transitively implemented by the stdlib code running on a particular system.

For instance, POSIX requires that write(2) calls are atomic with regard to one another when they are operating on regular files or symbolic links. This means, since any call to Write on things wrapping file descriptors or sockets actually results in a single "write" syscall of the target system, you might consult the docs of the target OS and get the idea of what will happen.

Note that POSIX only tells about filesystem objects, and if os.Stdout is opened to a terminal (or a pseudo-terminal) or to a pipe or to anything else which supports the write(2) syscall, the results will depend on what the relevant subsystem and/or the driver implement—for instance, data from multiple concurrent calls may be interspersed, or one of the calls, or both, may just be failed by the OS—unlikely, but still.

Going back to Go, from what I gather, the following facts hold true about the Go stdlib types which wrap file descriptors and sockets:

• They are safe for concurrent use by themselves (I mean, on the Go level).
• They "map" Write and Read calls 1-to-1 to the underlying object—that is, a Write call is never split into two or more underlying syscalls, and a Read call never returns data "glued" from the results of multiple underlying syscalls. (By the way, people occasionally get tripped by this no-frills behaviour — for example, see this or this as examples.)

So basically when we consider this with the fact fmt.*Print* are free to call Write any number of times per a single call, your examples which use os.Stdout, will:

• Never result in a data race — unless you've assigned the variable os.Stdout some custom implementation, — but
• The data actually written to the underlying FD will be intermixed in an unpredictable order which may depend on many factors including the OS kernel version and settings, the version of Go used to build the program, the hardware and the load on the system.

---

TL;DR

• Multiple concurrent calls to fmt.Fprint* writing to the same "writer" value defer their concurrency to the implementation (type) of the "writer".
• It's impossible to have a data race with "file-like" objects provided by the Go stdlib in the setup you have presented in your question.
• The real problem will be not with data races on the Go program level but with the concurrent access to a single resource happening on level of the OS. And there, we do not (usually) speak about data races because the commodity OSes Go supports expose things one may "write to" as abstractions, where a real data race would possibly indicate a bug in the kernel or in the driver (and the Go's race detector won't be able to detect it anyway as that memory would not be owned by the Go runtime powering the process).

Basically, in your case, if you need to be sure the data produced by any particular call to fmt.Fprint* comes out as a single contiguous piece to the actual data receiver provided by the OS, you need to serialize these calls as the fmt package provides no guarantees regarding the number of calls to Write on the supplied "writer" for the functions it exports.
The serialization may either be external (explicit, that is "take a lock, call fmt.Fprint*, release the lock") or internal — by wrapping the os.Stdout in a custom type which would manage a lock, and using it). And while we're at it, the log package does just that, and can be used straight away as the "loggers" it provides, including the default one, allow to inhibit outputting of "log headers" (such as the timestamp and the name of the file).