Concurrency in Go

Preface

Hey, welcome to Concurrency in Go! I’m delighted that you’ve picked up this book and excited to join you in exploring the topic of concurrency in Go over the next six chapters!

Go is a wonderful language. When it was first announced and birthed into the world, I remember exploring it with great interest: it was terse, compiled incredibly fast, performed well, supported duck typing, and—to my delight—I found working with its concurrency primitives to be intuitive. The first time I used the go keyword to create a goroutine (something we’ll cover, I promise!) I got this silly grin on my face. I had worked with concurrency in several languages, but I had never worked in a language that made concurrency so easy (which is not to say they don’t exist; I just hadn’t used any). I had found my way to Go.

Over the years I moved from writing personal scripts in Go, to personal projects, until I found myself working on a many-hundreds-of-thousands-of-lines project professionally. Along the way the community was growing with the language, and we were collectively discovering best practices for working with concurrency in Go. A few people gave talks on patterns they had discovered. But there still weren’t many comprehensive guides on how to wield concurrency in Go in the community.

It was with this in mind that I set out to write this book. I wanted the community to have access to high-quality and comprehensive information about concurrency in Go: how to use it, best practices and patterns ...