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)

Shared memory versus message passing

If you have been developing with Go for some time, you have probably heard the phrase “Do not communicate by sharing memory. Instead, share memory by communicating.” Sharing memory among the concurrent blocks of a program creates vast opportunities for subtle bugs that are hard to diagnose. These problems manifest themselves randomly, usually under load that cannot be simulated in a controlled test environment, and they are hard or impossible to reproduce. What cannot be reproduced cannot be tested, so finding such problems is usually a matter of luck. Once found, they are usually easy to fix with very minor changes. That adds insult to injury. Go supports both shared memory and message-passing models, so we will spend some time looking at what the shared memory and message-passing paradigms are.

In a shared memory system, there can be multiple processors or cores with multiple execution threads that use the same memory. In a Uniform...