Summary

In this chapter, we discussed the important and uniquely challenging topic of concurrency. As a good understanding of concurrency mechanisms is important to avoid issues, we started by learning the fundamentals of two of Go’s most central concurrency mechanisms, goroutines and channels. Then, we looked at three applied concurrency examples, which helped us further explore their behavior.

Once we were familiar with how concurrency works, we started looking at some commonly occurring issues with concurrency. The Go race detector is a tool that can help us detect data races and provide pinpoint guidance to engineers to help them to resolve the issue. However, due to the importance of timing, it is not possible to conclusively prove the absence of concurrency issues, so careful design is always the first defense. Finally, we looked at an applied example of how to use benchmarks to make concurrent calls to the BookSwap application and detect issues with Go’s race...