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Concurrency in Go

Communicating Sequential Processes#

Go concurrency is based on Communicating Sequential Processes, a paper from C.A.R. Hoare, in 1978.

Go has 4 tools to achieve concurrency:

  • Go routines
  • Channels
  • Select
  • Sync package

We'll go over all 4 of them in depth.

Goroutines#

Channels#

Channels can be thought of as a bucket chain. We have a sender, passing buckets down the chain, the buffer, which is the chain itself, and then the receiver. The buffer is optional. It helps to think of channels as data streams, and there are a lot of patterns that follow from this:

  • Fan-out
  • Funnel
  • Turnout

There's a lot of situations where channels can be blocking. Here are some examples:

unbuffered := make(chan int)
// This blocks, no receiverunbuffered <- 1// This also blocks, no senderi := <- unbuffered
// We have to add a receiver in a separate goroutine:go func() {    i := <- unbuffered}()
// This will synchronise both goroutinesunbuffered <- 1

Channels can be closed. This should always happen on the sender side!

Sources#