Book Image

Functional Programming in Go

By : Dylan Meeus
Book Image

Functional Programming in Go

By: Dylan Meeus

Overview of this book

While Go is a multi-paradigm language that gives you the option to choose whichever paradigm works best for the particular problem you aim to solve, it supports features that enable you to apply functional principles in your code. In this book, you’ll learn about concepts central to the functional programming paradigm and how and when to apply functional programming techniques in Go. Starting with the basic concepts of functional programming, this Golang book will help you develop a deeper understanding of first-class functions. In the subsequent chapters, you’ll gain a more comprehensive view of the techniques and methods used in functional languages, such as function currying, partial application, and higher-order functions. You’ll then be able to apply functional design patterns for solving common programming challenges and explore how to apply concurrency mechanisms to functional programming. By the end of this book, you’ll be ready to improve your code bases by applying functional programming techniques in Go to write cleaner, safer, and bug-free code.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
1
Part 1: Functional Programming Paradigm Essentials
7
Part 2: Using Functional Programming Techniques
11
Part 3: Design Patterns and Functional Programming Libraries

Functional programming and concurrency

We have already hinted at it throughout this book, but the ideas behind functional programming can help us write concurrent code. Typically, thinking about concurrency is a bit of a headache, even when a language has modern tools to support it, such as goroutines and channels. Before we dive too deep into this material, let’s first take a small detour as a refresher on what exactly we mean when we talk about concurrent code, and how it compares to parallelism and distributed computing.

Concurrency, parallelism, and distributed computing

The terms concurrency, parallelism, and distributed computing are, at times, used interchangeably. And while they are related, they are not exactly the same thing. Let’s just point out what we mean by concurrency first. Concurrency is what happens when our program can execute multiple tasks at the same time. For example, when we are playing a video game, typically a thread is playing audio,...