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)

Reading stack traces

If you are lucky, your program panics when something goes wrong, and prints out lots of diagnostic information. You would be lucky because if you have the output of a panicked program, you can usually figure out what went wrong by just looking at it together with the source code. So, let’s take a look at some stack traces. The first example is a deadlock-prone implementation of the dining philosophers problem, with just two philosophers:

func philosopher(firstFork, secondFork *sync.Mutex) {
for {
    firstFork.Lock()
    secondFork.Lock() // line: 10
    secondFork.Unlock()
    firstFork.Unlock()
  }
}
func main() {
    forks := [2]sync.Mutex{}
    go philosopher(&forks[1], &forks[0]) // line: 18
    go philosopher(&forks[0], &forks[1]) // line: 19
    select {} // line...