Concurrency

Goroutines

• Goroutine is a function that runs independently of the function that started it

• Goroutine can be any function that's called after special keyword go

• Frequently used to run function in the "background" while the main part does something else

Channels

• Pipeline for sending and receiving data

• Channels allows one goroutine to send structured data to another goroutine

• Channels can be used to block the main goroutine until all other goroutines finish their execution

• Like network socket, they can be unidirectional or bidirectional

• Can be short-live or long-lived

• Declared with the keyword chan along with a data type

• Default value of a channel is nil, so value needs to be assigned

  • Value can be assigned with the make function

• Writing and reading from channel is done with arrow syntax, where the arrow points the direction

• Sending and reading are blocking operations, meaning

  • when data is sent to channel using a goroutine, it will be blocked until data is consumed by another goroutine

  • when receiving data from channel using goroutine, it will be blocked until the data is available in the channel

• To avoid deadlocks, sender can close a channel. This means channel can't be communicated over

• Buffered channels can be used to create channels which don't block until channel capacity is exceeded

  • For example: make(chan int, 100)

Waitgroups

• Waitgroup allows to block a specific code block to allow a set of of goroutines to complete execution

• The following are the main methods of waitgroups

  • add - waitgroup act as counter holding the number of goroutines or functions to wait for. When counter is 0. the waitgroup releases the goroutines

  • wait - blocks the execution of the application until the waitgroup counter becomes 0

  • done - decreases the waitgroup counter by a value of 1

References

• https://blog.knoldus.com/achieving-concurrency-in-go/

• https://www.scaler.com/topics/golang/waitgroup-in-golang/