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)

The Go Memory Model

The Go memory model specifies when memory write operations become visible to other goroutines and, more importantly, when these visibility guarantees do not exist. As developers, we can skip over the details of the memory model by following a few guidelines when developing concurrent programs. Regardless, as mentioned before, obvious bugs are caught easily in QA, and bugs that happen in production usually cannot be reproduced in the development environment, and you may be forced to analyze the program behavior by reading code. A good knowledge of the memory model is helpful when this happens.

In this chapter, we will discuss the following:

  • Why a memory model is necessary
  • The happened-before relationship between memory operations
  • Synchronization characteristics of Go concurrency primitives