Saturday, September 13, 2025

What Does Adding AI To Your Product Even Mean?

Introduction

I have been asked this question multiple times: My management sent out a directive to all teams to add AI to the product. But I have no idea what that means ?


In this blog I discuss what adding AI actually entails, moving beyond the hype to practical applications and what are some things you might try.

At its core, adding AI to a product means using an AI model, either the more popular large language model (LLM) or a traditional ML model to either 

  • predict answers 
  • generate new data - text, image , audio etc

The effect of that is it enable the product to

  • do a better job of responding to queries
  • automate repetitive tasks
  • personalize responses
  • extract insights
  • Reduce manual labor

It's about making your product smarter, more efficient, and more valuable by giving it capabilities it didn't have before.

Any domain where there is a huge domain of published knowledge (programming, healthcare) or vast quantities of data (e-commerce, financial services, health, manufacturing etc), too large for the human brain to comprehend, AI has a place and will outperform what we currently do.


So how do you go about adding AI ?

Thanks to social media, AI has developed the aura of being super-complicated. But if reality, if you use off the shelf models, it is not that hard. Training models is hard. But 97% of us, will never have to do it. Below is a simple 5 step approach to adding AI to your system.

1. Requirements

It is really important that you nail down the requirement before proceeding any further. What task is being automated ? What questions are you attempting to answer ?

The AI solution will need to evaluated against this requirement. Not once or twice but on a continuous basis.

2. Model

Pick a model.

The recent explosion of interest in AI is largely due to Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT. At its core, the LLM is a text prediction engine. Give it some text and it will give you text that likely to follow.

But beyond text generation, LLMs have been been trained with a lot of published digital data and they retain associations between text. On top of it, they are trained with real world examples of questions and answers. For example, the reason they do such a good job at generating "programming code" is because they are trained with real source code from github repositories.

What model to use ?

The choices are:

  • Commercial LLMs like ChatGpt, Claude, Gemini etc
  • Open source LLMs like Llama, Mistral, DeepSeek etc
  • Traditional ML models
Choosing the right model can make a difference to the results. There might be a model specially tuned for your problem domain.

Cost, latency and accuracy are some parameters that are used to evaluate models.

3. Agent

Develop one or more agents.

Agent is the modern evolution of a service.  Agent is the glue that ties the AI model to the rest of your system. 

The Agent is the orchestration layer that:
  • Accepts requests either from a UI or another service
  • Makes requests to the model on behalf of your system
  • Makes multiple API calls to  systems to fetch data
  • May search the internet
  • May save state to a database at various times
  • In the end, returns a response or start some process to finish a task
It is unlikely that you will develop a model. But it is very likely that you will develop one or more agents.

4. Data pipeline

Bring your data.

A generic AI model can only do so much. Even without additional training, just adding your data to the prompts can yield better results.

The data pipeline is what makes the data in your databases, logs, ticket systems, github, Jira etc available to the models and agents.

  • get the data from source
  • clean it
  • format it
  • transform it
  • use it in either prompts or to further train the model

5. Monitoring

Monitor, tune, refine.

Lastly you need to continuously monitor results to ensure quality. LLMs are known to hallucinate and even drift. When the results are not good, your will try tweaking the prompt data, model parameters among other things.

Now let us seem how these concepts translate into some very simple real-world applications across different industries.


Examples

1. Healthcare: Enhancing Diagnostics and Patient Experience

Adding AI can mean:

  • Personalized Treatment Pathways: An AI Agent can analyze vast amounts of research papers, clinical trial data, and individual patient responses to suggest the most effective treatment plan tailored to a specific patient's profile.

    • Example: For a person with high cholesterol, an AI agent can come up with a personalized diet and exercise plan.


2. Finance: Personalized Investing

Adding AI could mean:

  • Personalized Financial Advice: Here, an AI Agent can serve as a "advisor" to offer highly tailored investment portfolios and financial planning advice.

    • Example: A banking app's AI agent uses an LLM to understand your financial goals and then uses its "tools" to connect to your accounts, pull real-time market data, and recommend trades on your behalf. It can then use its LLM to explain in simple terms why it made a specific trade or rebalanced your portfolio.


3. E-commerce: Customer Experience

Adding AI could mean:

  • Personalized shopping: AI models can find the right product at the right price with the right characteristics for user requirement

    • Example: Instead of me shopping and comparing for hours, AI does it for me and makes a recommendation on the final product to purchase.


In Conclusion

Adding AI to your product to make it better means using the proven power of AI models

  • To better answer customer request with insights
  • To automate repetitive time consuming task
  • To make predictions that were hard earlier
  • To gain insights into vast bodies of knowledge 
The tools are there. But to get results you need discipline, patience and process.

Start small. Focus on one specific business problem you want to solve, and build from there.


Saturday, September 6, 2025

CRDT Tutorial: Conflict Free Replication Data Types

Have you ever wondered how Google docs, Figma, Notion provide real time collaborative editing?

The challenge is : What happens when 2 users edit the same part of the document at the same time. 

  • User A at position 5: types X
  • User B at position 5: types Y

This is a concurrency problem. A traditional implementation would need to lock the document to handle this. But that would destroy real-time responsiveness. There is a need to automatically resolve conflicts so that every one ends up with same document state.

In Google docs, CRDTs  are used to handle concurrent text edits, ensuring that if users insert text at the same position, the system is able to resolve the order without conflicts.





What is a CRDT?

CRDT stands for conflict free replication data type.

A CRDT is a specially designed data structure for distributed systems that:

  • Can be replicated across multiple nodes or regions.

  • Allows each replica to be updated independently and concurrently (without locks or central coordination).

  • Guarantees that all replicas will converge to the same state eventually, without conflicts, even if updates are applied in different orders.

Why do we need CRDTs?

In collaborative editing (like Google Docs, Notion, Figma):

  • Many users may edit the same document concurrently.

  • Network latency or partitions mean updates may arrive in different orders at different servers.

  • We can’t just “last-write-wins” — that would lose user edits.

  • We want low-latency local edits (user sees their change immediately), with eventual consistency across the system.

  • Typical in distributed systems

CRDTs give us a way to allow users to edit locally first and let the system reconcile changes without central locks.

Types of CRDTs

There are two broad families:

  1. State-based (Convergent CRDTs, CvRDTs)

    • Each replica occasionally sends its full state to others.

    • Merging = applying a mathematical "join" function (e.g., union, max).

  2. Operation-based (Commutative CRDTs, CmRDTs)

    • Each replica sends only the operations performed (e.g., "insert X at position 2").

    • These operations are designed so that applying them in any order yields the same final result.

Examples of CRDTs in Practice

  • G-Counter (Grow-only counter): Each replica increments a local counter, merge = element-wise max.

  • PN-Counter (Positive-Negative counter): Like G-counter, but supports increment & decrement.

  • G-Set (Grow-only set): Only supports adding elements.

  • OR-Set (Observed-Remove set): Supports add & remove without ambiguity.

  • RGA (Replicated Growable Array) or WOOT or LSEQ: For collaborative text editing, where inserts/deletes happen at positions in a string.

These are the basis for how real-time editors like Google Docs or Figma handle concurrent text/graphic editing.

Below is a simplistic Java implementation of a CRDT:

https://github.com/mdkhanga/blog-code/tree/master/general/src/main/java/com/mj/crdt

The code above provides a simple implementation of a G-counter that supports insert, update, delete and merges replicas by taking the maximum value for each node. It is a starting point to understand how CRDTs ensure convergence in distributed systems.

CRDT vs. Centralized Coordination

  • If concurrent editing is rare → a simple centralized lock/version check may be enough (like your first idea).

  • If concurrent editing is common (e.g., Figma boards with dozens of people) → you want CRDTs  to avoid merge conflicts.

In short:

A CRDT is a mathematically designed data structure that ensures all replicas in a distributed system converge to the same state without conflicts — perfect for real-time collaborative editing.

Note that this would be needed only for collaborative editing at scale in distributed systems. For anything else, it could be an overkill.

Saturday, August 30, 2025

Cache in front of a slow database ?

 

Should You Front a Slow Database with a Cache?

Most of us have been there: a slow database query is dragging down response times, dashboards are red, and someone says, “Let’s put Redis in front of it.”

I have done it myself for an advertising system that needed response times of less than 30 ms. It worked very well.

It’s a tried-and-true trick. Caching can take a query that costs hundreds of milliseconds and make it return in single-digit milliseconds. It reduces load on your database and makes your system feel “snappy.” But caching isn’t free — it introduces its own problems that engineers need to be very deliberate about.




Good Use Cases for Caching

  • Read-heavy workloads
    When the same data is read far more often than it’s written. For example, product catalogs, user profiles, or static metadata.

  • Expensive computations
    Search queries, aggregated analytics, or personalized recommendations where computing results on the fly is costly.

  • Burst traffic
    Handling sudden spikes (sales events, sports highlights, viral posts) where the database alone cannot keep up.

  • Low latency requirements
    Some systems have low latency requirements. Clients need a response is say less than 50 ms or client aborts.


The Catch: Cache Consistency

The hardest part of caching isn’t adding Redis or Memcached — it’s keeping the cache in sync with the database.

Here are the main consistency issues you’ll face:

  1. Stale Data
    If the cache isn’t updated when the database changes, users may see outdated results.
    Example: A user updates their shipping address, but the checkout flow still shows the old one because it’s cached.

  2. Cache Invalidation
    The classic hard problem: When do you expire cache entries? Too soon → database load spikes. Too late → users see stale values.

  3. Race Conditions
    Writes may hit the database while another process is still serving old cache data. Without careful ordering, you risk “losing” updates.


Common Strategies

  • Cache Aside (Lazy Loading)
    Application checks cache → if miss, fetch from DB → populate cache.
    ✅ Simple, common.
    ❌ Risk of stale data unless you also invalidate on updates.

  • Write-Through
    Writes always go through the cache → cache updates DB.
    ✅ Consistency is better.
    ❌ Higher write latency, more complexity.

  • Write-Behind
    Writes update the cache, and DB updates happen asynchronously.
    ✅ Fast writes.
    ❌ Risk of data loss if cache fails before DB is updated.

  • Time-to-Live (TTL)
    Expire cache entries after a set period.
    ✅ Easy safety net.
    ❌ Not precise; stale reads possible until expiry.


So, Is It Worth It?

If your workload is read-heavy, latency-sensitive, and relatively tolerant of eventual consistency, caching is usually a big win.

But if your workload is write-heavy or requires strict consistency (think payments, inventory, or medical records), caching can create more problems than it solves.

The lesson: don’t add Redis or Memcached just because they’re shiny tools. Add them because you’ve carefully measured your system, know where the bottleneck is, and can live with the consistency trade-offs.


Takeaway:
Caching is like nitrous oxide for your system — it can make things blazing fast, but you need to handle it with care or you’ll blow the engine.

Thursday, August 28, 2025

The Unsung Heroes Behind Your AI Coding Assistant

While everyone's talking about ChatGPT and tools like Cursor, Windsurf, and GitHub Copilot transforming how we code, let's shine a light on the specialized models that actually power these coding experiences.


Meet the Code Generation Champions:


  • StarCoder - Trained on 80+ programming languages from GitHub repos, this open-source model excels at code completion and generation

  • CodeT5 - Google's encoder-decoder model that understands code structure and can translate between languages

  • InCoder - Meta's bidirectional model that can fill in code gaps, not just complete from left to right

  • CodeGen - Salesforce's autoregressive model trained on both natural language and code

  • Codex (OpenAI) - The foundation behind GitHub Copilot, though now evolved into GPT-4 variants


What makes these different from general LLMs?

  • Trained on massive code repositories (billions of lines)
  • Understand syntax, semantics, and programming patterns
  • Can maintain context across entire codebases
  • Specialized in code-specific tasks like debugging, refactoring, and documentation


The magic isn't just in having "AI that codes" - it's in having models that truly understand the intricacies of software development. They aren’t just regurgitating text—they’re tuned for the nuances of programming, which makes them invaluable for developers. These specialized architectures are why your AI assistant can suggest that perfect function name or catch that subtle bug you've been hunting for hours.


The real game-changer? Most of these models are open-source, democratizing access to powerful coding assistance beyond just the big tech companies.

Sunday, August 24, 2025

JDK 21 Virtual threads: The end of regular threads ? Not quite.

 A question I get asked all the time: If JDK 21 supports virtual threads, do I ever need to use regular threads ?

Java 21 brought us virtual threads, a game-changer for writing highly concurrent applications. Their lightweight nature and massive scalability are incredibly appealing. It's natural to wonder: do we even need regular platform (OS) threads anymore?

While virtual threads are fantastic for many I/O-bound workloads, there are still scenarios where platform threads remain relevant. Here's why:

1. CPU-Bound Tasks:

Virtual threads yield the carrier thread when they perform blocking I/O operations. However, for purely CPU-bound tasks, they don't offer a significant advantage over platform threads in terms of raw processing power. In fact, the context switching involved might introduce a tiny bit of overhead.

Consider a computationally intensive task like calculating factorials:

Virtual threads example:


// A CPU-intensive task
Runnable cpuBoundTask = () -> {
    long result = 1;
    for (int i = 1; i <= 10000; i++) {
        result *= i;
    }
    System.out.println("Virtual thread task finished.");
};

// Start a virtual thread for the task
Thread.startVirtualThread(cpuBoundTask);


Platform threads example:

Runnable cpuBoundTask = () -> {
    long result = 1;
    for (int i = 1; i <= 10000; i++) {
        result *= i;
    }
    System.out.println("Platform thread task finished.");
};

// Start a regular platform thread
new Thread(cpuBoundTask).start();

For sustained CPU-bound work, managing a smaller pool of platform threads might still be a more efficient approach to leverage the underlying hardware.

2. Integration with Native Code and External Libraries:

Some native libraries or older Java APIs might have specific requirements or behaviors when used with threads. Virtual threads, being a newer abstraction, might not be fully compatible or optimally performant with all such integrations. Platform threads, being closer to the operating system's threading model, often provide better compatibility in these scenarios.

3. Thread-Local Variables with Care:

While virtual threads support thread-local variables, their potentially large number can lead to increased memory consumption if thread-locals are heavily used and store significant data. With platform threads, you typically have a smaller, more controlled number of threads, making it easier to reason about thread-local usage. However, it's crucial to manage thread-locals carefully in both models to avoid memory leaks.

4. Profiling and Debugging:

The tooling around thread analysis and debugging is more mature for platform threads. While support for virtual threads is rapidly improving, there might be cases where existing profiling tools offer more in-depth insights for platform threads.

5. Backward compatibility

If you want you library or server to be available to users who are on JDKs earlier than JDK21, then you have no choice but to use regular threads. Virtual threads are not just a new library; they are a fundamental change to the Java Virtual Machine's threading model (part of Project Loom). The underlying code that manages and schedules virtual threads on top of carrier threads is not present in older JVMs. This can be one of the most important reasons for using platform threads.

In Conclusion:

Virtual threads are a powerful addition to the Java concurrency landscape and will undoubtedly become the default choice for many concurrent applications, especially those with high I/O. However, platform threads still have their place, particularly for CPU-bound tasks, legacy integrations, and situations requiring fine-grained control over thread management.

Understanding the nuances of both models will allow you to make informed decisions and build more efficient and robust Java applications.

Sunday, May 4, 2025

Understanding Isolation levels vs Consistency levels

In databases, the terms isolation level and consistency level/model are sometimes used interchangeably. "Read repeatable" and "Serializable" are well known isolation levels. But "Strict Serializable" and "Linearizable" are consistency terms. 

If you have used Mysql or Postgresql, you know probably know what an isolation levels like "Read repeatable" or "Serializable" means. But when you work on a distributed database you hear about consistency level much more.

The first time I heard about consistency level was when I worked with Apache Cassandra which claimed to only support "eventual consistency".  A few years ago when my company was evaluating distributed databases, we had a few architects that insisted that we needed a database that support "strict serializability". CockroachDB was a database that supported this consistency level.

If you are confused, read long. I wrote this blog in attempt to clear up my confusion.

So far, the best explanations on this topic that I found are by Daniel J Abadi [2] [3]. Kyle Kingsbury @Jepson [1] has good descriptions of the topic as well.

But first, a clarification on what consistency means.

What is consistency ?

Consistency is an overloaded term and its meaning has changed in recent times.

ACID consistency

The database must preserve its internal correctness rules after every transaction.

Consider a banking database with a constraint account_balance > 0. 

If the starting account_balance is 50 and a transaction tried to deduct 100, that is a violation of that constraint and should fail.

This is the C is ACID. Databases support constraints to ensure this. But it is mainly the responsibility of the application programmer. It is well understood and rarely discussed these days.

Distributed systems consistency

The system must ensure that all nodes (or clients) agree on the same view of data.

Make the distributed system feel like a single threaded single node system. Read of a value any where in the system produces the same result [2]. The result returned is the most recently written value no matter where it was written.

Consider a system with multiple nodes. X was 1. The value X=2 is written to one node and replicated to others. If clients read from the replicas. Do they all see X=2 immediately ? With strict serializable consistency level , the answer is yes. With weaker models, it is possible they read a an older value. 

Most of us first heard of this description from the CAP theorem.

Why the difference ?

Both describe behavior under concurrency. 

Isolation levels describe problems that occurs in single node databases when transactions execute concurrently. At the highest isolation level transactions execute in some order. Each transaction executes as if it were alone.

In distributed systems there is network latency, replication and partitioning,  all contributing latency and timing issues to concurrency issues. Consistency approaches concurrency issues taking time and latency into account as well. At the highest consistency level, transactions execute in order of their order of completion (commit) in real time. 

Serializable is the strictest isolation level. Strict serializability is the strictest consistency model. In a single node system, there is very little difference between the two because the time issues are small.

Isolation Levels vs. Consistency Models

To summarize the key differences.

Isolation Levels

  • Prevent read, writes of uncommitted data.
  • Prevent anomalies like read uncommitted, non repeatable reads, phantom reads
  • Focus on managing concurrent access to data while balancing performance and correctness.
  • Common isolation levels (from weakest to strongest):
    • Read Uncommitted
    • Read Committed
    • Repeatable Read
    • Serializable — the strictest standard defined by the ANSI SQL standard.
  • Old blog

Consistency Levels

  • Typically relevant distributed databases.
  • Time is a factor
  • They describe the guarantees about visibility and ordering of updates in a distributed, replicated data system.
  • They focus on the behavior perceived by clients across multiple nodes or replicas.
  • Examples include:
    • Strict serializability
    • Linearizability 
    • causal consistency

Example to Illustrate the Difference:

Scenario:

  • Two accounts A and B initially have a balance of 100 each.
  • Two concurrent transactions:
    • Tx1: Transfer 50 from A to B.
    • Tx2: Reads balances of A and B and sums them

Isolation level Serializable:

  • Tx1 and Tx2 are serialized, and the sum read by Tx2 is 200.
  • (Tx1, Tx2) and (Tx2, Tx1) are valid orders irrespective of when each actually committed first.

Consistency level Strict Serializable

  • If Tx1 commits before Tx2 starts, Tx2 must see all effects of Tx1. The only valid order is (Tx1, Tx2)
  • However if there is some overlap like if Tx1 commits after Tx2 starts, then both orders (Tx1, Tx2) and (Tx2, Tx1) can be valid. Reason is that Tx2 cannot read the data committed by Tx1

A few descriptions


Let us briefly touch on some levels you will encounter often. For more detailed descriptions, I will refer you to https://jepsen.io/consistency [1]

Serializability

Transactions occur in some total order. Even though they may actually execute concurrently, it appears as if they execute one after another. While serializable will prevent non repeatable reads and phantom reads, It will allow "time travel" anomalies as shown in the example above. It can appear that Tx2 happened before Tx1, even though in reality it was the other way around.

Strict Serializability

Transactions occur in a strict order that is consistent with the real time (clock time) order in which transactions occur. It applies to the entire system encompassing multiple objects. A is before B in the order if A commits before B begins. So the only valid order is (A,B). However if A commits after B begin, then both orders (A, B) and (B, A) are valid. 

Linearizable

Transactions occur in a strict order that is consistent with the real time (clock time) order in which transactions occur. But this applies to a single object not to the entire dataset. Definition of a single object varies. Could be a key or a table. [1]

Most of the time concurrency issues are important when multiple threads touch the same data and that why this model is also as important as strict serializability.

Causal Consistency

Transaction that are causally related are seen by all nodes in the same order, while concurrent (unrelated) operations may be seen in different orders. In a social media application, a user making a post and another user liking the post are causally related. The like must be seen only after the post is seen. However, it is ok for a unrelated post that happened after the previous post to be seen before that.

Conclusion

It is all about how systems behave under concurrency. 

Isolation levels deal with how transactions behave when they run at the same time, while consistency models talk about how different nodes in a distributed system agree on data. And "consistency" itself has changed over time, from enforcing business rules in ACID databases to ensuring replicas don't drift apart in distributed ones. 

Database vendors advertise the consistency level they support as a key feature. That is why it is important we understand what it means and ensure that we pick the right database the fits our needs.

References 

1. https://jepsen.io/consistency

2. Introduction to consistency levels , Daniel J Abadi

Tuesday, April 1, 2025

A non trivial concurrency example in Go language

Overview

In this blog I describe a non trivial concurrency example in the Go programming language. The code is part of my Dynago project https://github.com/mdkhanga/dynago.

This is not a tutorial on Go or on writing concurrent programs. But if you know a little bit of Go and/or little bit of concurrent programing, then I am hoping this can be a useful example. 

In Dynago, I have so far built a leaderless cluster of peer servers. The command for starting a server needs to only point to one other server. The only exception is the first server, which has nothing to point to.  The servers exchange ping and gossip like messages to share the details on the members of the cluster. After a few messages every server has the cluster membership list. When servers join or leave the cluster, the membership list is updated.

Code

If you would like to skip reading the text and jump to the code, the relevant files are :

https://github.com/mdkhanga/dynago/blob/main/cluster/peer.go
https://github.com/mdkhanga/dynago/blob/main/cluster/ClusterService.go

The relevant tests are 
https://github.com/mdkhanga/dynago/blob/main/e2e-tests/test_membership.py
https://github.com/mdkhanga/dynago/blob/main/e2e-tests/test_membership_chain.py

I show some screenshots of code snippets in this blog for the casual reader. But if you are interested in the code, I recommend directly looking at the code in github.

Go concurrency recap

In Go, you write code that executes concurrently by writing Goroutines.

A goroutine is like a lightweight thread. It is written as a regular function.

You run a goroutine using the go keyword.

Go provides channels for communicating between goroutines. Channels are a safer way to send and receive data. This is safer than using shared memory as is done in Java, C++. You do not have to use mutexes to avoid memory visibility and race conditions.

The select statement lets the goroutine wait on receiving data on a channels.

Though not recommended, the shared memory approach of  data exchange is also supported. You will need to use primitives from the https://pkg.go.dev/sync package to synchronize access to data.

The Examples

There were two features in Dynago where concurrency is relevant.

1. Each server receives a message on a GRPC stream. It has to process the message and sometimes send a response back. This is the classic producer - consumer problem. Some goroutines produce. Other goroutines consume and do work. I use channels for sharing the messages between producers and consumers.

2. A map stores the list of cluster members. 

  • The map is to be updated as servers join or leave the cluster.
  • Periodically we need to iterate over the map and send out our copy of the membership list to others.
    • The receiving server will merge the received list with it own list.
    • If the receiving servers list is more up to date, then it sends a response to and the original sender has to merge.
    • timestamps are used to determine who is more recent
This the case of multiple goroutines reading and writing a data structure concurrently. 

Example 1: Channels 

The peer struct shown in the code below defines a channel InMessagesChan for incoming messages and a channel OurMessgesChan for outgoing messages.



The receiveMessages goroutine method has for loop with following code. It reads a message from a Grpc stream and sends it to the InMessagesChannel.



The processMessageLoop goroutine method in peer.go has a loop that takes messages from the InMessagesChannel and processes them.  When a response is needed, it processes the message and writes the response that needs to go out to the OutMessagesChannel. The image below is shortened version of the real code.



Lastly the sendLoop goroutine method has a for loop that takes messages from the outMessageChannel and writes them to the outbound Grpc stream.



As you can see, very simple. 3 goroutines working concurrently by exchange data over channels. No locking, no synchronization an fewer problems.

In my opinion, channels is one of the best features of Go.

Example 2 : Shared memory


I have this struct cluster which has the list of peers in the cluster



We need to add /update / remove entries from the map in a thread safe manner. The code below uses the mutex to synchronize access to the map. These methods are either called from both peer.go and cluster.go.



The code below shows a loop from the ClusterInfoGossip method that uses the same mutex to synchronize the map while iterating over it. Typically the calls from add, remove and gossip happen from different goroutines. If you do not synchronize, you will have memory visibility problems. Note that since peer is updated, we need to synchronize access to the peer as well.





You might be wondering, why can I not just do this using channels when it is safer and cleaner ? What you would do is to write a function with like an event loop.  The function can accept commands on a channel and read , update or iterate over the map based on the command. The code would look something like below



Which approach you take is sometimes a personal choice. For the message processing, I preferred channels. But for CRUD on a map, I preferred shared memory.

Conclusion

In conclusion, what I have shown you here is a non trivial concurrency example in Go. Go makes it quite easy to write concurrent programs. The recommended way to share data between goroutines is by channels. By using channels, you can avoid race conditions and memory visibility issues. But the traditional approach of shared memory with synchronization is also supported. 

As I build out Dynago, I plan to blog about the interesting pieces.  If you like my blogs, please follow me on LinkedIn and/or X/twitter.