Comment by jrockway

atomic.AddInt32 feels a lot like locking to me. You end up with a write barrier and all the associated consequences, so you can kill throughput (in a way that is more difficult to notice in the profiler, though you'll probably notice it when it's a problem if you ask pprof for a line-by-line profile).

sync.Mutex.Lock is implemented like this:

    func (m *Mutex) Lock() {
            // Fast path: grab unlocked mutex.
            if atomic.CompareAndSwapInt32(&m.state, 0, mutexLocked) {
                    if race.Enabled {
                            race.Acquire(unsafe.Pointer(m))
                    }
                    return
            }
            // Slow path (outlined so that the fast path can be inlined)
            m.lockSlow()
    }

lockSlow is, of course, a bit more complicated.