Hi! No, I think you've misunderstood the assignment. The example posits that you have a "game" running, which should end when the last player leaves. While only using channels as a synchronization primitive (a la CSP), at what point do you decide the last player has left, and where and when do you call close on the channel?
I don't think there's much trouble at all fixing the toy example by extending the message type to allow communication of the additional conditions, and I think my changes are better than the alternative of using a mutex. Have I overlooked something?
Assuming the number of players are set up front, and players can only play or leave, not join. If the expectation is that players can come and go freely and the game ends some time after all players have left, I believe this pattern can still be used with minor adjustment
(please overlook the pseudo code adjustments, I'm writing on my phone - I believe this translates reasonably into compilable Go code):
type Message struct {
exit bool
score int
reply chan bool
}
type Game struct {
bestScore int
players int // > 0
messages chan Message
}
func (g *Game) run() {
for message := range g.messages {
if message.exit {
g.players = g.players - 1;
if g.players == 0 {
return
}
continue
}
if g.bestScore < 100 && g.bestScore < message.score {
g.bestScore = message.score
}
acceptingScores := g.bestScore < 100
message.reply <- acceptingScores
}
}
func (g *Game) HandlePlayer(p Player) error {
for {
score, err := p.NextScore()
if err != nil {
g.messages <- { exit: true
}
return err
}
g.messages <- { score, reply }
if not <- reply {
g.messages <- { exit: true }
return nil
}
}
}I don't think channels should be used for everything. In some cases I think it's possible to end up with very lean code. But yes, if you have a stop channel for the other stop channel it probably means you should build your code around other mechanisms.
Since CSP is mentioned, how much would this apply to most applications anyway? If I write a small server program, I probably won't want to write it on paper first. With one possible exception I never heard of anyone writing programs based on CSP (calculations?)
> Since CSP is mentioned, how much would this apply to most applications anyway? If I write a small server program, I probably won't want to write it on paper first. With one possible exception I never heard of anyone writing programs based on CSP (calculations?)
CSP is really in the realm of formal methods. No you wouldn't formulate your server program as CSP, but if you were writing software for a medical device, perhaps.
This is the FDR4 model checker for CSP, it's a functional programming language that implements CSP semantics and may be used to assert (by exhaustion, IIRC) the correctness of your CSP model.
I believe I'm in the minority of Go developers that have studied CSP, I fell into Go by accident and only took a CSP course at university because it was interesting, however I do give credit to studying CSP for my successes with Go.
Naive question, can't you just have a player count alongside the best score and leave when that reaches 0?
Adding an atomic counter is absolutely a great solution in the real world, definitely, and compare and swap or a mutex or similar totally is what you want to do. In fact, that's my point in that part of the post - you want an atomic variable or a mutex or something there. Other synchronization primitives are more useful than sticking with the CSP idea of only using channels for synchronization.