Go 1.19 introduced new atomic types (wrappers). Allowing one to replace:

var x int32
for range 100 {
  go atomic.AddInt32(&x, 1)
}

With:

var x atomic.Int32
for range 100 {
  go x.Add(1)
}

On the whole, this is safer, as the atomic types don't allow non-atomic access, which is a source of bugs. Note the +checkatomic annotation of checklocks.

These new-style atomics also don't suffer from misalignment problems, see dominikh/go-tools#171.

Not all usages are (easily) migratable, a non-exhaustive list of the top of my head:

• Initialized values (e.g.: x := int32(42) ), though this could be done with an ugly closure, it may not be worth it.
• Multi-package usages (exposed atomics, if they exist for some reason)
• ...(probably a lot more)

cc @adonovan