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

Immutability

In this chapter, we will look at immutability. We are going to cover what exactly it means to be immutable, and how the Go language helps preserve immutability at the struct-level. To understand how this works, we will take a look at how Go handles pointers and references to objects, what the performance implications are, and how to decide between the pointer-reference trade-offs. We will also dive into the implications of garbage collection, unit testing, and pure functional programming.

These are the main topics that we will cover in this chapter:

  • What is immutability?
  • How to write immutable code
  • How do pointers and references work in Go?
  • Analyzing the performance of mutable and immutable code
  • Examples of concurrency and testing with immutable code