This is one of the areas where Zig's combination of anonymous blocks and block-based defer really pay off. To create a locked region of code is just this

This is one of the areas where Zig's combination of anonymous blocks and block-based defer really pay off. To create a locked region of code is just this { mutex.lock(); defer mutex.unlock(); // Do mutex things } It's possible to get this wrong still, of course, but both the anonymous scope and the use of `defer` make it easier to get things right. Nothing can prevent poor engineering around mutex use though. I'd want a critical path for a concurrent hashmap to look like this: { shared_map.lock(); defer shared_map.unlock(); if (shared_map.getOrNull(foo) == null) { shared_map.put(foo, new_val); } } Where the SharedMap type has an internal mutex, and a way to check it, and all operations panic if no lock has been acquired. It could have `shared_map.lockAndGet(OrNull?)(...)`, so that the kind of problem pattern you're describing would stand out on the page, but it's still a one-liner to do an atomic get when that's all you need the critical path to perform. I don't think these invariants are overly onerous to uphold, but one does have to understand that they're a hard requirement.