Effective Concurrency in Go: Develop, analyze, and troubleshoot high performance concurrent applications with ease

 Cover....1

Title Page....2

Copyright and Credit....3

Dedicated....4

Contributors....5

Table of Contents....8

Preface....12

Chapter 1: Concurrency – A High-Level Overview....18

Technical Requirements....18

Concurrency and parallelism....18

Shared memory versus message passing....25

Atomicity, race, deadlocks, and starvation....28

Summary....38

Question....38

Further reading....38

Chapter 2: Go Concurrency Primitives....40

Technical Requirements....40

Goroutines....40

Channels....47

Mutex....61

Wait groups....66

Condition variables....69

Summary....73

Questions....73

Chapter 3: The Go Memory Model....74

Why a memory model is necessary....74

The happened-before relationship between memory operations....75

Synchronization characteristics of Go concurrency primitives....78

Package initialization....78

Goroutines....79

Channels....80

Mutexes....82

Atomic memory operations....83

Map, Once, and WaitGroup....83

Summary....85

Further reading....85

Chapter 4: Some Well-Known Concurrency Problems....86

Technical Requirements....86

The producer-consumer problem....86

The dining philosophers problem....90

Rate limiting....96

Summary....102

Chapter 5: Worker Pools and Pipelines....104

Technical Requirements....104

Worker pools....104

Pipelines, fan-out, and fan-in....110

Asynchronous pipeline....113

Fan-out/fan-in....115

Fan-in with ordering....120

Summary....125

Questions....125

Chapter 6: Error Handling....126

Error handling....126

Pipelines....132

Servers....133

Panics....134

Summary....137

Chapter 7: Timers and Tickers....138

Technical Requirements....138

Timers – running something later....138

Tickers – running something periodically....141

Heartbeats....143

Summary....145

Chapter 8: Handling Requests Concurrently....146

Technical Requirements....146

The context, cancelations, and timeouts....147

Backend services....152

Distributing work and collecting results....157

Semaphores – limiting concurrency....160

Streaming data....161

Dealing with multiple streams....171

Summary....176

Chapter 9: Atomic Memory Operations....178

Technical Requirements....178

Memory guarantees....178

Compare and swap....180

Practical uses of atomics....181

Counters....182

Heartbeat and progress meter....182

Cancellations....185

Detecting change....186

Summary....187

Chapter 10: Troubleshooting Concurrency Issues....188

Technical Requirements....188

Reading stack traces....189

Detecting failures and healing....194

Debugging anomalies....201

Summary....203

Further reading....203

Index....204

Other Books You May Enjoy....209

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.

What You Will Learn:

• Understand basic concurrency concepts and problems
• Learn about Go concurrency primitives and how they work
• Learn about the Go memory model and why it is important
• Understand how to use common concurrency patterns
• See how you can deal with errors in a concurrent program
• Discover useful techniques for troubleshooting

Who this book is for:

If you are a developer with basic knowledge of Go and are looking to gain expertise in highly concurrent backend application development, then this book is for you. Intermediate Go developers who want to make their backend systems more robust and scalable will also find plenty of useful information. Prior exposure Go is a prerequisite.