Simulating Deadlock in Golang

Deadlock is a situation where two or more goroutines are unable to proceed because each is waiting for the other to release a resource. Detecting and preventing deadlocks is important in concurrent programming to ensure the smooth execution of programs.

I have attached a video https://youtube.com/shorts/IwG7axpmYtw?feature=share

A case scenario where four trains are at four close sections and A is waiting for B to release a cross-section so that it can use it(the crosssection is being locked to avoid collision ) and B is waiting for C to release the third cross-section, while C is waiting for D to release the fourth cross-section, but D is waiting for A to release the first cross-section. and hence the deadlock!

As I mentioned in my last article, this is courtesy to James Cutajar on his Udemy course on Mastering Multithreading Programming with Go (Golang)

Concurrency is achieved through goroutines and channels/mutexes, making it relatively easy to write concurrent programs. Goroutines are lightweight threads managed by the Go runtime, and channels are used for communication and synchronization between goroutines.

Deadlock is one of the drawbacks of not handling concurrency well in coding.

Consequences of deadlock

Deadlocks can have significant consequences, leading to program failures and unresponsive behavior.

They include:

1. Unresponsive application - the application is unable to progress
2. Debugging difficulty - deadlocks are one of the hard things to debug.
3. Deadlocks can lead to data corruption or loss.
4. Negative user experience - an unresponsive application would do that to you!

But when done right concurrency is an amazing tool especially when dealing with big loads of data, or handling traffic.

Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, and Prometheus are but a few tools that are built with Golang and implement concurrency.

That being said Golang is an amazing programming language to have, especially since companies are migrating their systems to leverage the power of Golang