Notes: Golang Advanced Concurrency Concepts and Introduction to Golang Testing

The tutorial consist of the following modules (in sense of Go Modules):

• context/cancel1
• context/cancel2
• context/cancel3
• context/emit
• context/listen
• context/timeout
• context/value
• error_group
• errors_in_waitgroup
• gosched
• once
• pipelines. There are additional modules related to testing (not to Go's Concurrency) in folder: testing.

To run/build any of them:

cd <module>
go run main.go

context

This package provides tools to signal cancellation/completion of potentially long-running processes. For example, we would like to signal a process cancellation of a long-running HTTP call or a DB session if there are errors or other custom events in order to free the resources of the application.

There are two sides to the context cancellation, that can be implemented:

• Listening for the cancellation event,
• Emitting the cancellation event.

Things to remember about context:

• A context object can be cancelled only once
• Use it when you want to actually cancell an operation, not when you want to propagate errors
• Wrapping a cancellable context with WithTimeout or other functions make the context object cancellable in too many ways.
• Pass a child context to a goroutine you start or pass an independent context object. Here is an example:

func parent(rootCtx context.Context) {
	ctx, cancel := context.WithCancel(rootCtx)
	defer cancel()

	someArg := "loremipsum"
	go child(context.Background(), someArg)
}

Note: calling cancel() in the parent goroutine may cancel the child goroutine because there is no synchronization of the child - parent() (and thus its defer) does not wait for child().

• do not pass the cancel() function downstream. It will result in the invoker of the cancellation function not knowning what the upstream impact of cancelling the context may be eg. there may be other contexts that are derived from the cancelled context.

Context factory methods:

• for a parent/new context: Background()
• for a cancellation context: WithCancel()
• for a time-limited context: WithTimeout(), WithDeadline()
• for a key-value storing context: WithValue()
• for an empty context:TODO().

How to accept/use context objects in downstream:

context/listen

In this example an HTTP server on port 9000 is set up. It processes a request within 2 seconds. If there is no interruption from the client to the server, then after 2 seconds, the server returns 200 OK. Otherwise (when the client interrupts HTTP request), the server uses a context object obtained from the HTTP request object to signal the cancellation (write a message to STDOUT).

The context.Done() method returns a channel that receives an instance of struct{} whenever the context receives a cancellation event. Listening for a cancellation event is just waiting for <-ctx.Done().

context/emit

In this example we have two long-running jobs. They both take a context parameter - it is a child context created with a cancellation functions obtained from the roor context. Listening for a cancellation event is implemented again as waiting for <-ctx.Done().

errors_in_waitgroup

The module contains an approach to synchronize a pool of goroutines in case of errors. It uses two channels (for done-signals and error-signals) and a select clause that "listens" to these channels. The done-channel is never sent to, it is merely closed after successful completion of all goroutines. If there is an error, then it the first error is passed to the error-channel. As this happens-before calling wg.Done(), the select statement will chose the error-channel output before the nil value from the done-channel. If there is no error, then the select clause choses the done-channel's output because the error-channel is never ready (no elements in it).

runtime.Gosched

This function tells the Golang runtime to pause executing the current goroutine and instead start another waiting goroutine. It is called yielding and can be used to switch between goroutines and ensure no goroutine takes too much time. Goroutine switching is most influenced by this instruction when GOMAXPROCS == 1. On a machine with multiple cores there is less chance that goroutines will have to wait for each other because their execution is parallel not sequential.

sync.Once

In the given example, an instruction (a function expression) passed to sync.Once.Do() will be run only once, regardless of where it is called.

If once.Do(f) is called multiple times, only the first call will invoke f, even if f has a different value in each invocation. A new instance of sync.Once is required for each function to execute.

pipelines

This module presents a very common pattern of joining multiple operations using channels. Initially data are sent to a channel which is passed to a function that performs first transformation and sends its results to a channel which is then taken by another operation function and so on..