SoFunction
Updated on 2025-03-04

Learn about the concurrency characteristics of Go language in one article

Go has been known for its excellent concurrent support since its inception. Through lightweight threads, channels and selects, Go provides a unique and powerful tool set that makes concurrent programming easy and efficient. This article will explore the concurrency characteristics of Go language in depth, parse its core components, and demonstrate through examples how to effectively use Go for concurrent programming.

Goroutines: Lightweight threading

Goroutines is the cornerstone of Go's concurrency implementation. They are lightweight threads managed by the Go runtime, can use very little stack memory and run efficiently in thousands or even millions of concurrent instances. Creating a goroutine is very simple, just add the go keyword before the function call:

go functionName()

Compared to operating system threads, goroutines' scheduling is performed by the Go runtime and does not rely directly on kernel threads, which means that creation and destruction is lower and context switching is faster.

Channels: Concurrent and secure data delivery

Channels is the main mechanism in Go to implement the secure transmission of data between goroutines. A channel is a communication pipeline that allows one goroutine to send a specific type of value to another goroutine. Create a channel using the make function:

ch := make(chan int)

Send data to and receive data from the channel, using the <- operator:

ch &lt;- data // Send data to channeldata := &lt;-ch // Receive data from channel

Channels supports blocking operations, which means that the transmission and reception of data can be carried out simultaneously, providing a powerful means for concurrent control.

Select: Multiplexing

The Select statement is a unique construction of Go, which can listen to read and write operations of multiple channels. When multiple channels are ready at the same time, the select will randomly select one execution, which provides great convenience for handling asynchronous IO:

select {
case msg1 := <-ch1:
    ("Received", msg1)
case msg2 := <-ch2:
    ("Received", msg2)
}

Example: Use Go concurrency features to implement a simple concurrency model

Suppose you need to implement a simple concurrency program where one goroutine generates a number, sends it to the channel, and another goroutine reads the number from that channel and prints it. Here is the code to achieve this:

package main

import (
    "fmt"
    "time"
)

func produce(ch chan int) {
    for i := 0; i &lt; 10; i++ {
        ch &lt;- i // Send i to channel        ()
    }
    close(ch)
}

func consume(ch chan int) {
    for i := range ch {
        ("Received:", i)
    }
}

func main() {
    ch := make(chan int)
    go produce(ch)
    consume(ch)
}

Summarize

The concurrency characteristics of Go language make it possible to develop efficient concurrent programs through its concise and powerful language design. Goroutines, Channels and Select structures together form the core of Go concurrent programming, making Go outstanding in network services, microservice architectures, and parallel data processing. By mastering these concurrent primitives, high-performance, highly concurrent applications can be effectively built, making full use of the powerful capabilities of modern multi-core processors.

Supplement: Go language high concurrency characteristics

Golang (Go) is a highly concurrency programming language. It provides a simple and powerful way to implement high concurrency programming through features such as Goroutine and Channel.

Among them, Goroutine is a lightweight thread, managed by the Go runtime environment, can be executed on one or more threads, the overhead of creation and destruction is very small, and thousands of Goroutines can be created to achieve high concurrency.

Channel is a mechanism for communication between Goroutines, which can pass data between different Goroutines, enabling data synchronization and sharing. Through the Select statement, non-blocking selection operations can be performed on multiple channels, monitor the data flow of multiple channels, and perform corresponding processing when any of the channels has data to be read or written.

In order to protect shared resources, Golang provides a Mutex mechanism, through which mutex locks can achieve mutually exclusive access to shared resources, avoiding data competition and errors. WaitGroup is used to wait for a group of Goroutines to complete. You can wait for all child Goroutines to be executed in the main Goroutine before continuing to execute. Atomic (atomic operation) is used to perform atomic operations on shared resources to avoid data races and errors.

Through Context (context), context information can be passed between Goroutines and processed accordingly when it is necessary to cancel or timeout

Application scenarios

Network programming, parallel computing, data stream processing, distributed systems, concurrent testing, etc.

For example, for example (1) network programming, Golang's high concurrency characteristics make it very suitable for handling network requests and connections. By using Goroutine and Channel, highly concurrent server and client programs can be easily implemented, handling a large number of concurrent requests, and improving system throughput and performance. (2) Parallel computing, the task can be decomposed into multiple independent Goroutines, and communicate and coordinate through the Channel to realize parallel execution of tasks and improve computing efficiency.

Application sample code

package main
 
import (
	"fmt"
	"sync"
	"sync/atomic"
	"time"
	"context"
)
 
func main() {
	// Use of Goroutine and Channel	ch := make(chan int)
	go func() {
		ch &lt;- 42
	}()
 
	value := &lt;-ch
	("Value received from channel:", value)
 
	// Use of Select statements	ch1 := make(chan int)
	ch2 := make(chan int)
 
	go func() {
		(1 * )
		ch1 &lt;- 1
	}()
 
	go func() {
		(2 * )
		ch2 &lt;- 2
	}()
 
	select {
	case value := &lt;-ch1:
		("Value received from ch1:", value)
	case value := &lt;-ch2:
		("Value received from ch2:", value)
	}
 
	// Use of Mutex	var mutex 
	var counter int
 
	for i := 0; i &lt; 10; i++ {
		go func() {
			()
			counter++
			("Counter:", counter)
			()
		}()
	}
 
	(1 * )
 
	// Use of WaitGroup	var wg 
 
	for i := 0; i &lt; 5; i++ {
		(1)
		go func() {
			defer ()
			("Goroutine executed")
		}()
	}
 
	()
 
	// Use of Atomic	var count int64
 
	for i := 0; i &lt; 10; i++ {
		go func() {
			atomic.AddInt64(&amp;count, 1)
			("Count:", atomic.LoadInt64(&amp;count))
		}()
	}
 
	(1 * )
 
	// Use of Context	ctx, cancel := (())
 
	go func() {
		(2 * )
		cancel()
	}()
 
	select {
	case &lt;-():
		("Context canceled")
	}
}

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