Concurrency and Functional Programming

Concurrency is all around us, both in the real world as well as the virtual one. Humans can easily multitask (although we might not do a good job at either task). It’s entirely possible to drink a cup of coffee while you are reading this chapter or to run while listening to a podcast. For machines, concurrency is a complex undertaking, although a lot of that complexity can be hidden away by the programming language we choose.

Go was built to be a language with all the necessary tools a modern-day software engineer needs. As we are now in a world where CPU power is abundant for most intents and purposes, it’s only natural that concurrency was a main concern when developing the language, rather than having to bolt it on later. In this chapter, we are going to take a look at how functional programming can help with concurrency and, conversely, how concurrency can help with functional programming.

In this chapter, we are going...