context: fix synchronization in ExampleAfterFunc_cond
Condition variables are subtle and error-prone, and this example
demonstrates exactly the sorts of problems that they introduce.
Unfortunately, we're stuck with them for the foreseeable future.
As previously implemented, this example was racy: since the callback
passed to context.AfterFunc did not lock the mutex before calling
Broadcast, it was possible for the Broadcast to occur before the
goroutine was parked in the call to Wait, causing in a missed wakeup
resulting in deadlock.
The example also had a more insidious problem: it was not safe for
multiple goroutines to call waitOnCond concurrently, but the whole
point of using a sync.Cond is generally to synchronize concurrent
goroutines. waitOnCond must use Broadcast to ensure that it wakes up
the target goroutine, but the use of Broadcast in this way would
produce spurious wakeups for all of the other goroutines waiting on
the same condition variable. Since waitOnCond did not recheck the
condition in a loop, those spurious wakeups would cause waitOnCond
to spuriously return even if its own ctx was not yet done.
Fixing the aforementioned bugs exposes a final problem, inherent to
the use of condition variables in this way. This one is a performance
problem: for N concurrent calls to waitOnCond, the resulting CPU cost
is at least O(N²). This problem cannot be addressed without either
reintroducing one of the above bugs or abandoning sync.Cond in the
example entirely. Given that this example was already published in Go
1.21, I worry that Go users may think that it is appropriate to use a
sync.Cond in conjunction with context.AfterFunc, so I have chosen to
retain the Cond-based example and document its pitfalls instead of
removing or replacing it entirely.
I described this class of bugs and performance issues — and suggested
some channel-based alternatives — in my GopherCon 2018 talk,
“Rethinking Classical Concurrency Patterns”. The section on condition
variables starts on slide 37. (https://youtu.be/5zXAHh5tJqQ?t=679)