When is it better to use Spinlock instead of Mutex for resource synchronization?

A spinlock is better to use instead of a Mutex in situations where the expected lock hold time is very short, and the overhead of a context switch is too high compared to simple busy-wait checking.

A spinlock actively checks the availability of a resource in a loop without putting the thread into a waiting state, which is effective for short-term locks and on multi-core systems.

Examples of suitable cases:

• Critical sections that execute very quickly.
• High-frequency operations with minimal contention.

However, if the lock might last long, a spinlock will waste CPU resources, so in such cases, it is better to use a Mutex, which puts the thread into a waiting state and releases the CPU.

In Go, the standard library does not provide a spinlock directly, but a similar behavior can be conceptually implemented using atomic operations and wait loops.