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

Beginning with generators

A generator is a function that returns the next value of a sequence each time it is called. The biggest advantage of using generators is the lazy creation of new values of the sequence. In Go, this can either be expressed with an interface or with a channel. One of the upsides of generators when they're used with channels is that they produce values concurrently, in a separate goroutine, leaving the main goroutine capable of executing other kinds of operations on them.

It can be abstracted with a very simple interface:

type Generator interface {
Next() interface{}
}

type GenInt64 interface {
Next() int64
}

The return type of the interface will depend on the use case, which is int64 in our case. The basic implementation of it could be something such as a simple counter:

type genInt64 int64

func (g *genInt64) Next() int64 {
*g++
return...