Learn Concurrent Programming with Go

6 Synchronizing with waitgroups and barriers

This chapter covers

• Waiting for completed tasks with waitgroups
• Building waitgroups with semaphores
• Implementing waitgroups using condition variables
• Synchronizing concurrent work using barriers

Waitgroups and barriers are two synchronization abstractions that work on groups of executions (such as goroutines). We typically use waitgroups to wait for a group of tasks to complete. We use barriers to synchronize many executions at a common point.

We’ll start this chapter by examining Go’s bundled waitgroups using a couple of applications. Later, we’ll investigate two implementations of waitgroups: one built using semaphores and a more functionally complete one using condition variables.

Go does not ...