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 saw the tools that are available in the Go standard package for synchronization. They are located in two packages: sync, which provides high-level tools such as mutexes, and sync/atomic, which executes low-level operations.

First, we saw how to synchronize data using lockers. We saw how to use sync.Mutex to lock a resource regardless of the operation type, and sync.RWMutex to allow for concurrent readings and blocking writes. We should be careful using the second one because writes could be delayed by consecutive readings.

Next, we saw how to keep track of running operations in order to wait for the end of a series of goroutines, using sync.WaitGroup. This acts as a thread-safe counter for current goroutines and makes it possible to put the current goroutine to sleep until it reaches zero, using the Wait method.

Furthermore, we checked...