Goose isn't thread safe? 🤔

[miparnisari]

This is about functions goose.SetLogger and goose.SetBaseFS:

[mfridman]

That's correct, there are parts of the public API that are not thread-safe, such as the global setters you've identified.

In practice, most projects initialize goose settings once, so it won't be an issue. However, when using the goose library in go tests that run concurrently there will likely be issues if 2 goroutines are trying to set the global settings (as of now, v3.15.0, there are no mutexes).

I would very much like to fix this by adding the concept of a *goose.Provider so all settings are scoped to the provider and within the same runtime you could have as many providers as you'd like.

#379 and #507

I had a /v4 branch that added a provider and refactored a lot of the project, but I'm considering porting the provider bits into the current /v3 module and iterating on that.

[mfridman]

There could be an opportunity to add a lock within the goose package itself to protect the global setters, which would eliminate the race conditions.

It's important to be aware that these operations involve modifying global settings. Using a setter function repeatedly might lead to unpredictable outcomes.

Another way to resolve this issue involves the func TestMain() approach, which allows you to centralize all initialization tasks within a single location.

[mfridman]

We recently (v3.16.0 and higher) added a Provider abstraction into the core library, which is safe for concurrent use.

There's a bit more information in the Provider blog post:

https://pressly.github.io/goose/blog/2023/goose-provider/