Welcome to Part 1 of the Go Distributed Systems Lab series! Over the course of 20 hands-on projects, we are building core distributed systems primitives from the ground up using Go 1.22+ and the standard library (net, sync, context, log/slog, encoding/binary).
Before jumping into raw socket framing, gossip protocols, or Raft consensus, we need to master the foundational concurrency building blocks inside a single process: Goroutines, Channels, and Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP).
In traditional concurrent programming (like C++ or Java), thread synchronization often relies on shared memory protected by mutexes, lock-free queues, or read-write locks.
Go flips this model with a core design principle:
"Do not communicate by sharing memory; instead, share memory by communicating."
