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)

Panics

Panics are different from errors. A panic is either a programming error or a condition that cannot be reasonably remedied (such as running out of memory.) Because of this, a panic should be used to convey as much diagnostic information to the developer as possible.

Some errors can become panics depending on the context. For instance, a program may accept a template from the user and generate an error if the template parsing fails. However, if the parsing of a hardcoded template fails, then the program should panic. The first case is a user error, and the second case is a bug.

As a developer of concurrent programs, there are only three things you can do with an error: you either handle it (log it, choose another program flow, or ignore it by doing nothing), you pass it to the caller (sometimes with some additional contextual information), or you panic. When a panic happens in a concurrent program, the runtime ensures that all the nested function calls return, one by one...