Ive been writing Go for over a decade and I still feel like I never quite "got" channels. Every time I use them I need to go consult the manual, and none of the patterns feel obvious which is weird considering the rest of the language feels very obvious.
Too many years of Java and managing Threads and Runnables probably rotted my brain.
Channels are honestly one of the most over-used things in Go. I've been writing Go professionally since 2015 and I honestly rarely use them. Programmers new to Go love to shovel them in everywhere because "why use Go if you're NOT going to use channels?" and I have to say sorry, no - write it serially, then determine if it breaches your SLOs, THEN determine if concurrency fixes it.
Very interesting feedback. I'm a Go newbie and the goroutine/channel duality sounds delightful from where I stand, but once again I have no professional experience with Go yet, only sample programs to get used to the language.
One question though: your advice is to write things serially first before moving to concurrency, which for me is general programming common sense, but would you argue that once you start writing concurrent code then channels are not well suited compared to "good old" sync primitives (mutexes, etc.)?
There are a lot of places where channels look like the correct primitive but may actually be overkill. One of my favorite examples is collecting results from a group of goroutines. If you know the number of results up front, you can just define a slice and give each thread an index of the slice to write to (and a waitgroup of course). No channels, no mutexes, and completely thread safe.
voidfunc · · focus · HN ↗
Too many years of Java and managing Threads and Runnables probably rotted my brain.
vrosas · · focus · HN ↗
mugul · · focus · HN ↗
One question though: your advice is to write things serially first before moving to concurrency, which for me is general programming common sense, but would you argue that once you start writing concurrent code then channels are not well suited compared to "good old" sync primitives (mutexes, etc.)?
vrosas · · focus · HN ↗
goodpaul6 · · focus · HN ↗
geoka9 · · focus · HN ↗