[dualogy]

> Honest question: aren't the concurrency primitives in Go largely intended to make concurrent memory accesses like this an anti-pattern

Intended, yes. But that doesn't mean we also develop "cleanly&properly" at all times, in the real world. It's a great "backup" for when formerly-prototyping-now-production code is getting slightly out of hand over time.

[a_bonobo]

To expand on this point:

The Go-documentation has a couple of great examples [1] that could easily happen in the real world (before the first coffee).

[1] http://tip.golang.org/doc/articles/race_detector.html