Book Image

Go Systems Programming

Book Image

Go Systems Programming

Overview of this book

Go is the new systems programming language for Linux and Unix systems. It is also the language in which some of the most prominent cloud-level systems have been written, such as Docker. Where C programmers used to rule, Go programmers are in demand to write highly optimized systems programming code. Created by some of the original designers of C and Unix, Go expands the systems programmers toolkit and adds a mature, clear programming language. Traditional system applications become easier to write since pointers are not relevant and garbage collection has taken away the most problematic area for low-level systems code: memory management. This book opens up the world of high-performance Unix system applications to the beginning Go programmer. It does not get stuck on single systems or even system types, but tries to expand the original teachings from Unix system level programming to all types of servers, the cloud, and the web.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Shared memory

Shared memory is the traditional way that threads use for communicating with each other. Go comes with built-in synchronization features that allow a single goroutine to own a shared piece of data. This means that other goroutines must send messages to this single goroutine that owns the shared data, which prevents the corruption of the data! Such a goroutine is called a monitor goroutine. In Go terminology, this is sharing by communicating instead of communicating by sharing.

This technique will be illustrated in the sharedMem.go program, which will be presented in five parts. The first part of sharedMem.go has the following Go code:

package main 
 
import ( 
   "fmt" 
   "math/rand" 
   "sync" 
   "time" 
) 

The second part is the following:

var readValue = make(chan int) 
var writeValue = make(chan int) 
 
func SetValue...