Synchronize Shared State with Goroutines

Introduction

This challenge aims to demonstrate how to use channels and goroutines to synchronize access to shared state across multiple goroutines.

Skills Graph

Stateful Goroutines

In concurrent programming, it is essential to synchronize access to shared state to avoid race conditions and data corruption. This challenge presents a scenario where a single goroutine owns the state, and other goroutines send messages to read or write the state.

Requirements

• Use channels to issue read and write requests to the state-owning goroutine.
• Use readOp and writeOp structs to encapsulate requests and responses.
• Use a map to store the state.
• Use resp channels to indicate success and return values.
• Use atomic package to count read and write operations.
• Use time package to add a delay between operations.

Example

## Running our program shows that the goroutine-based
## state management example completes about 80,000
## total operations.
$ go run stateful-goroutines.go
readOps: 71708
writeOps: 7177

## For this particular case the goroutine-based approach
## was a bit more involved than the mutex-based one. It
## might be useful in certain cases though, for example
## where you have other channels involved or when managing
## multiple such mutexes would be error-prone. You should
## use whichever approach feels most natural, especially
## with respect to understanding the correctness of your
## program.

Summary

This challenge demonstrated how to use channels and goroutines to synchronize access to shared state. By having a single goroutine own the state and using channels to issue read and write requests, we can avoid race conditions and data corruption.