Channels

When talking about concurrency, one of the natural concerns that arises is that of data safety and synchronization among concurrently executing code. If you have done concurrent programming in languages such as Java or C/C++, you are likely familiar with the, sometimes brittle, choreography required to ensure running threads can safely access shared memory values to achieve communication and synchronization between threads.

This is one area where Go diverges from its C lineage. Instead of having concurrent code communicate by using shared memory locations, Go uses channels as a conduit between running goroutines to communicate and share data. The blog post Effective Go (https://golang.org/doc/effective_go.html) has reduced this concept to the following slogan:

Do not communicate by sharing memory; instead, share memory by communicating.

Note

The concept of channel has its roots in communicating sequential processes (CSP), work done by renowned computer scientist C. A. Hoare, to model...