concurrency - Understanding goroutines

Question

I'm trying to understand concurrency in Go. In particular, I wrote this thread-unsafe program:

package main

import "fmt"

var x = 1

func inc_x() { //test
  for {
    x += 1
  }
}

func main() {
  go inc_x()
  for {
    fmt.Println(x)
  }
}

I recognize that I should be using channels to prevent race conditions with x, but that's not the point here. The program prints 1 and then seems to loop forever (without printing anything more). I would expect it to print an infinite list of numbers, possibly skipping some and repeating others due to the race condition (or worse -- printing the number while it is being updated in inc_x).

My question is: Why does the program only print one line?

Just to be clear: I'm not using channels on purpose for this toy example.

Answer 1

Waitting for answers