Learn Concurrent Programming with Go

9 Programming with channels

This chapter covers

• Introducing communicating sequential processes
• Reusing common channel patterns
• Taking advantage of channels being first-class objects

Working with channels requires a different way of programming than when using memory sharing. The idea is to have a set of goroutines, each with its own internal state, exchanging information with other goroutines by passing messages on Go’s channels. In this way, each goroutine’s state is isolated from direct interference by other executions, reducing the risk of race conditions.

Go’s own mantra is not to communicate by shared memory but to instead share memory by communicating. Since memory sharing is more prone to race conditions and requires complex synchronization ...