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)

Error handling

Error handling in Go has been a polarizing issue. Frustrated with the repetitive error-handling boilerplate, many Go users in the community (including me) suggested improved error-handling mechanisms. Most of these proposals were actually error-passing improvements because, to be honest, errors are rarely handled. Rather, they are passed to the caller, sometimes wrapped with some contextual information.

A good number of error-handling proposals suggested different variations on throw-catch, while many others were simply what is called syntactic sugar for if err!=nil return err. Many of these proposals missed the point that the existing error reporting and handling conventions work nicely in a concurrent environment, such as the ability to pass errors via a channel: you can handle errors generated by one goroutine in another goroutine.

An important point I like to emphasize when working with Go programs is that most of the time, they can be analyzed by solely relying...