Summary

The main theme in this chapter was that concurrency is not parallelism. Parallelism is an intuitive concept people are used to because the real world works in parallel. Concurrency is a mode of computation where blocks of code may or may not run in parallel. The key here is to make sure we get the correct result no matter how the program is run.

We also talked about the two main concurrency programming paradigms: message passing and shared memory. Go permits both, which makes it easy to program, but equally easy to make mistakes. The last part of this chapter was about fundamental concepts of concurrent programming – that is, race conditions, atomicity, deadlocks, and livelock concepts. The important point to note here is that these are not theoretical concepts – these are real situations that affect how programs run and how they fail.

We tried to avoid Go specifics in this chapter as much as possible. The next chapter will cover Go concurrency primitives...