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Go Concurrency Distilled

402 points · 187 comments · chmaynard

  1. SamInTheShell · · focus · HN ↗
    The concurrency and threading in Go just feels like magic compared to every other language. I'm a goroutine addict and I refuse to be rehabilitated.

    Just from observations over the years, I don't think there's any other language quite like this, in terms of how things can end up happening in any thread.

    1. hank1931 · · focus · HN ↗
      How about Erlang or Elixir using BEAM?

      Supposedly WhatsApp scaled to serving over 1 billion users with Erlang and BEAM.

      RabbitMQ, used by Reddit, uses Erlang and BEAM.

      Discord uses Elixer and BEAM.

      I just traveled down the BEAM rabbit hole. Fascinating story. The Ericsson Computer Science Laboratory cranked out some amazing products in the early 1990's.

      Their goal was five nines of reliability for Ericsson telephone switches.

      According to Joe Armstrong (an interesting fellow from Ericsson), the AXD301 ATM switch achieved nine nines over a nine-month period using Erlang and BEAM in 2002. That calculates out to 24 milliseconds of downtime.

      1. asp_hornet · · focus · HN ↗
        Yes! BEAM and OTP is amazing. Concurrency is one aspect and Go has great concurrency primitives, but what about supervision, and recovery and failure modes? Often they’re left to the developer as per Go’s philosophy which I think makes sense. OTP offers a lot of solutions to this.

        I think Go and the BEAM family languages are both great.

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