I have been using go professionally for a while and I’ve found it to be quite remarkable and I wanted to share a few hints to people so they can find those remarkable parts faster than I did.

To get a better sense of go there are five essential concurrency features:

1. Go statements are a nice syntax to run background micro threads (as mentioned in this article)

2. Go Channels pass messages across those threads as fixed memory queues and powerfully as you add items to the queue you block until the item is added (the second part, blocking on add, is very powerful as it prevents the flow of concurrency from infinitely filling queues that are never consumed! There is more to go channels that is possible with fixed memory buffering to prevent the block, but that blocking is key to consider!)

3. Go Select Statements (not switch statements!) let you watch concurrent queues at once in a thread safe way. These are essential for using channels properly and they help manage almost all channel flow (consumer thread progression, error handling, done detection, etc)

4. Go Context objects let you cleanup background threads based on multiple criteria server errors and timeouts being the most common. The best hint you are in a concurrent-friendly function is usually that it passes context as an argument for cleanup purposes.

5. Go wait groups let you wait for all the go statements spawned to finish before proceeding (simple, but essential at times)

I know it’s hard to learn the entirety of a langue without using it daily, but I encourage people to try out go to experience these five parts together. Go is truly excellent at expressing some hard concepts well. That doesn’t make it easy — concurrency isn’t easy — but it is easier with go constructs than without.