You need a way to do atomic reads and writes, but you don't need to have atomic types. In Go you just use sync/atomic which implements atomicity outside the typ

You need a way to do atomic reads and writes, but you don't need to have atomic types. In Go you just use sync/atomic which implements atomicity outside the type system. When you use "regular" operations, you don't get atomicity, but what you get is well-defined, and explained here: https://golang.org/ref/mem https://golang.org/ref/mem.