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 dining philosophers problem

We visited the dining philosopher’s problem in Chapter 1, Concurrency: A High-Level Overview, while discussing concurrency at a higher level. This is an important problem in the study of critical sections. The problem may seem contrived, but it shows a problem that comes up often in real-world situations: entering the critical section may require the acquisition of multiple resources (mutexes). Any time you have a critical section that relies on multiple mutexes, you have a chance of deadlock and starvation.

Now, we will study some solutions to this problem in Go. We will begin by restating the problem:

There are five philosophers dining together at the same round table. There are five plates, one in front of each philosopher, and one fork between each plate, five forks total. The dish they are eating requires them to use both forks, one on their left side and the other on their right side. Each philosopher thinks for a random interval and...