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)

Tickers – running something periodically

It may be a reasonable idea to run a function periodically using repeated calls to AfterFunc:

var periodicTask func()
periodicTask = func() {
   DoSomething()
   time.AfterFunc(time.Second, periodicTask)
}
time.AfterFunc(time.Second,periodicTask)

With this approach, each run of the function will schedule the next one, but variations in the running duration of the function will accumulate over time. This may be perfectly acceptable for your use case, but there is a better and easier way to do this: use time.Ticker.

time.Ticker has an API very similar to that of time.Timer: You can create a ticker using time.NewTicker, and then listen to a channel that will periodically deliver a tick until it is explicitly stopped. The period of the tick will not change based on the running time of the listener. The following program prints the number of milliseconds elapsed since the beginning of the program for...