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

Chapter 14

  1. What is a generator? What are its responsibilities?
    A generator is a tool that returns a series of values—it returns the next value in the series each time it is called. It's responsible for generating values in the sequence on demand. In Go, this can be done by using a channel to receive the values that are sent through by a goroutine that creates them.
  2. How would you describe a pipeline?
    A pipeline is a type of application flow that splits the execution into different stages. These stages communicate with one another by using a certain means of communication, such as networks, or runtime internals, such as channels.
  3. What type of stage gets a channel and returns one?
    An intermediate stage will receive from a receive-only channel and return another receive-only channel.
  4. What is the difference between fan-in and fan-out?
    Fan-in is also known as demultiplexing...