Book Image

Effective Concurrency in Go

By : Burak Serdar
5 (1)
Book Image

Effective Concurrency in Go

5 (1)
By: Burak Serdar

Overview of this book

The Go language has been gaining momentum due to its treatment of concurrency as a core language feature, making concurrent programming more accessible than ever. However, concurrency is still an inherently difficult skill to master, since it requires the development of the right mindset to decompose problems into concurrent components correctly. This book will guide you in deepening your understanding of concurrency and show you how to make the most of its advantages. You’ll start by learning what guarantees are offered by the language when running concurrent programs. Through multiple examples, you will see how to use this information to develop concurrent algorithms that run without data races and complete successfully. You’ll also find out all you need to know about multiple common concurrency patterns, such as worker pools, asynchronous pipelines, fan-in/fan-out, scheduling periodic or future tasks, and error and panic handling in goroutines. The central theme of this book is to give you, the developer, an understanding of why concurrent programs behave the way they do, and how they can be used to build correct programs that work the same way in all platforms. By the time you finish the final chapter, you’ll be able to develop, analyze, and troubleshoot concurrent algorithms written in Go.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Concurrency – A High-Level Overview

For many who don’t work with concurrent programs (and for some who do), concurrency means the same thing as parallelism. In colloquial speech, people don’t usually distinguish between the two. But there are some clear reasons why computer scientists and software engineers make a big deal out of differentiating concurrency and parallelism. This chapter is about what concurrency is (and what it is not) and some of the foundational concepts of concurrency.

Specifically, we’ll cover the following main topics in this chapter:

  • Concurrency and parallelism
  • Shared memory versus message passing
  • Atomicity, race, deadlocks, and starvation

By the end of this chapter, you will have a high-level understanding of concurrency and parallelism, basic concurrent programming models, and some of the fundamental concepts of concurrency.