What are the concurrency guarantees of goroutines? ;)

I'm confused here too - is there some other desired behavior? I thought the goal here was to avoid race conditions and just reproduce that order, since that's what's in the source code...

> var buttons = []string{"red", "blue", "green", "yellow", "purple"}

There are none, right? So even if you add mutexes to the existing code in an attempt to remove race conditions, it will still have race conditions, and have no guaranteed output order, because you have no guarantee which order the goroutines will start in.

The obvious way to solve it in order to get the answer shown in the source code is

    if x == 0 {
        *sequence = []Button{{"red"}, {"blue"}, {"green"}, {"yellow"}, {"purple"}}
    }
    return

This way there is nothing concurrently touching sequence, nor is there anything concurrent touching rand, nor is anything relying on goroutine starting order, nor are there other race conditions. But yet the site says this is wrong.

It turns out there is a guaranteed order, because of the way this puzzle is executed. https://bit.ly/2rqqWkh

Where is this guarantee stated? I don't see anything on that page about a guarantee. Does the go spec make this guarantee?

How do we know how the puzzle is executed?

And if you're saying some guarantee exists that the last executes first, then the rest execute in order, that's empirically false:

https://play.golang.org/p/3gV0TYG4GQW

    1000
    773
    774
    775
    776
    ...

I'm not saying it's a good guarantee.

You can click the lightbulb to get a hint. The way I solved it was with a Mutex.

Yeah I know about the hint. But the result the hint leads you to doesn't make sense. Using a Mutex removes data races, but it does not remove race conditions. By leaving the race condition in, the code is has output that cannot be relied on. But yet the challenge wants us to think that somehow the output has a specific value that can be relied on.

Looks good! Kubernetes has historically been a huge pain to deal with; If this smooths out the process I might use it for my next project.