README.md

Exercise: Web Crawler

From A Tour of Go, concurrency exercise #10.

To run

$> go run *.go

Explanation

1. In main.go we create a stateManager struct, which holds 3 things: a. a fetched map, so we can check whether we've already fetched a URL in O(1) time, b. a waitGroup that will Add(1) when we start fetching a url and Done when we finish fetching a url, and c. a rwMutex so we can safely read to and write from the fetched array from many goroutines concurrently

2. In crawl.go we implement an isAlreadyFetched helper function that uses our stateManager.rwMutex to check whether a url has already been fetched and return a boolean.

3. Also in crawl.go, we: a. Add(1) to our stateManager.waitGroup to tell the WaitGroup that we are waiting to fetch an item, b. implement a goroutine using an IIFE (Immediately Invoked Function Expression) -- go func() { ... }() that does the following...

   1. tell the wait group that we're finished whenever we return from the IIFE's scope,
   2. return if we've reached our maximum fetching depth,
   3. skip processing the node if we've already fetched the url,
   4. handle fetching failures,
   5. safely mark the url as fetched in stateManager.fetched using our stateManager.rwMutex (lock for writing this time), and
   6. recurse and yield to other goroutines.

Future improvements

1. Allow main.go to receive the depth as a command-line argument.
2. Refactor the Crawl function's IIFE. It has too many responsibilities, and mixes levels of abstraction: orchestration of concurrency, logging, error handling, recursion.