Book Image

Hands-On System Programming with Go

By : Alex Guerrieri
Book Image

Hands-On System Programming with Go

By: Alex Guerrieri

Overview of this book

System software and applications were largely created using low-level languages such as C or C++. Go is a modern language that combines simplicity, concurrency, and performance, making it a good alternative for building system applications for Linux and macOS. This Go book introduces Unix and systems programming to help you understand the components the OS has to offer, ranging from the kernel API to the filesystem. You'll then familiarize yourself with Go and its specifications. You'll also learn how to optimize input and output operations with files and streams of data, which are useful tools in building pseudo-terminal applications. You'll gain insights into how processes communicate with each other, and learn about processes and daemon control using signals, pipes, and exit codes. This book will also enable you to understand how to use network communication using various protocols, including TCP and HTTP. As you advance, you'll focus on Go's best feature - concurrency, which will help you handle communication with channels and goroutines, other concurrency tools to synchronize shared resources, and the context package to write elegant applications. By the end of this book, you will have learned how to build concurrent system applications using Go
Table of Contents (24 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Section 1: An Introduction to System Programming and Go
5
Section 2: Advanced File I/O Operations
9
Section 3: Understanding Process Communication
14
Section 4: Deep Dive into Concurrency
19
Section 5: A Guide to Using Reflection and CGO

Summary

In this chapter, we talked about the two main actors in Go concurrency—goroutines and channels. We started by explaining what a thread is, what the differences are between threads and goroutines, and why they are so convenient. Threads are heavy and require a CPU core, while goroutines are lightweight and not bound to a core. We saw how easily a new goroutine can be started by executing a function preceded by the go keyword, and how it is possible to start a series of different goroutines at once. We saw how the arguments of the concurrent functions are evaluated when the goroutine is created and not when it actually starts. We also saw that it is very difficult to keep different goroutines in sync without any additional tools.

Then, we introduced channels that are used to share information between different goroutines and solve the synchronization...