In April and May I’ll be speaking at GopherChina and GopherCon Singapore, respectively. This post is a teaser for the talks that were selected by the organisers. If you’re in the area, I hope you’ll come and hear me speak.

GopherChina

GopherChina is the third event in this conference series and this year will return to Shanghai. I was lucky to attend the event in 2016 and am looking forward to 2017.

The hidden #pragmas of Go

Go isn’t like C. It doesn’t have a preprocessor, it doesn’t have macros, and it certainly doesn’t have #define, but Go does have pragmas.

What are pragmas? The name come from the #pragma declaration that tells C compilers to alter their interpretation of a piece of code. Now, Go doesn’t have a #pragma directive, but it does have ways of altering the operation of the Go compiler via directive syntax hidden in comments.

This talk will explore the history of these directives, how and why they are used, and how you can, but probably shouldn’t, use them in your own code.

GopherCon Singapore

GopherCon Singapore is the latest in the GopherCon franchise, and as flight times go, relatively close to home. I’m delighted to have the opportunity to present at their inaugural conference in May.

Concurrency made Easy

In my experience, many people who come to Go do so because they have a problem where being able to run more than one task at a time in their program would be beneficial. Ruby and Python programmers come to Go because the concurrency story is much better, the same is true of Node programmers; the event loop is still inherently single threaded.

But, most programmers who stick with Go for a while tend to look back on their early efforts and say things like “wow, I really went overboard with channels” or “I went crazy with goroutines when I started writing Go. It was impossible to understand what the program did”. For people who learn Go formally from an instructor or a book, the concurrency section is always the last section they cover.

So there is a dichotomy here. Go’s headline feature is simple, lightweight concurrency. As a product the language sells itself on that feature alone. On the other hand, there is a narrative that concurrency isn’t actually that easy to use, otherwise people wouldn’t make it the last things in their books or classes, or perhaps more accurately, concurrency is not the solution to every problem.

With this as a background, I’d like to explore some strategies for using concurrency in Go without the pitfalls of convoluted code, the importance of memory ownership, and the best way to structure a Go program using goroutines.