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)

Summary

The main theme in this chapter was that concurrency is not parallelism. Parallelism is an intuitive concept people are used to because the real world works in parallel. Concurrency is a mode of computation where blocks of code may or may not run in parallel. The key here is to make sure we get the correct result no matter how the program is run.

We also talked about the two main concurrency programming paradigms: message passing and shared memory. Go permits both, which makes it easy to program, but equally easy to make mistakes. The last part of this chapter was about fundamental concepts of concurrent programming – that is, race conditions, atomicity, deadlocks, and livelock concepts. The important point to note here is that these are not theoretical concepts – these are real situations that affect how programs run and how they fail.

We tried to avoid Go specifics in this chapter as much as possible. The next chapter will cover Go concurrency primitives...