Book Image

Hands-On High Performance with Go

By : Bob Strecansky
Book Image

Hands-On High Performance with Go

By: Bob Strecansky

Overview of this book

Go is an easy-to-write language that is popular among developers thanks to its features such as concurrency, portability, and ability to reduce complexity. This Golang book will teach you how to construct idiomatic Go code that is reusable and highly performant. Starting with an introduction to performance concepts, you’ll understand the ideology behind Go’s performance. You’ll then learn how to effectively implement Go data structures and algorithms along with exploring data manipulation and organization to write programs for scalable software. This book covers channels and goroutines for parallelism and concurrency to write high-performance code for distributed systems. As you advance, you’ll learn how to manage memory effectively. You’ll explore the compute unified device architecture (CUDA) application programming interface (API), use containers to build Go code, and work with the Go build cache for quicker compilation. You’ll also get to grips with profiling and tracing Go code for detecting bottlenecks in your system. Finally, you’ll evaluate clusters and job queues for performance optimization and monitor the application for performance regression. By the end of this Go programming book, you’ll be able to improve existing code and fulfill customer requirements by writing efficient programs.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
1
Section 1: Learning about Performance in Go
7
Section 2: Applying Performance Concepts in Go
13
Section 3: Deploying, Monitoring, and Iterating on Go Programs with Performance in Mind

Introduction to Performance in Go

This book is written with intermediate to advanced Go developers in mind. These developers will be looking to squeeze more performance out of their Go application. To do this, this book will help to drive the four golden signals as defined in the Site Reliability Engineering Workbook (https://landing.google.com/sre/sre-book/chapters/monitoring-distributed-systems/). If we can reduce latency and errors, as well as increase traffic whilst reducing saturation, our programs will continue to be more performant. Following the ideology of the four golden signals is beneficial for anyone developing a Go application with performance in mind.

In this chapter, you'll be introduced to some of the core concepts of performance in computer science. You'll learn some of the history of the Go computer programming language, how its creators decided that it was important to put performance at the forefront of the language, and why writing performant Go is important. Go is a programming language designed with performance in mind, and this book will take you through some of the highlights on how to use some of Go's design and tooling to your advantage. This will help you to write more efficient code.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

  • Understanding performance in computer science
  • A brief history of Go
  • The ideology behind Go performance

These topics are provided to guide you in beginning to understand the direction you need to take to write highly performant code in the Go language.