Chapter 7. Concurrency patterns
In this chapter
- Control the lifetime of programs
- Manage a pool of resources that can be reused
- Create a pool of goroutines that can process work
In chapter 6 you learned what concurrency is and how channels behave, and reviewed code that showed concurrency in action. In this chapter you’ll extend that knowledge by reviewing more code. We’ll review three packages that implement different concurrency patterns that you can use in your own projects. Each package provides a practical perspective on the use of concurrency and channels and how they can make concurrent programs easier to write and reason about.
The purpose of the runner package is to show how channels can be used to monitor the amount of time a program is running and terminate the program if it runs too long. This pattern is useful when developing a program that will be scheduled to run as a background task process. This could be a program that runs as a cron job, or in a worker-based cloud environment like Iron.io.
Let’s take a look at the runner.go code file from the runner package.