Lecture 2: RPC and Threads

The podcast features a speaker discussing the Go programming language, particularly its use in distributed programming and the course labs. The speaker explains why Go was chosen for the course, highlighting its support for threads, remote procedure calls, type and memory safety, and garbage collection. The discussion covers threads (Go routines) for managing concurrency, I/O concurrency, multi-core parallelism, and background tasks. The speaker addresses the challenges of threaded code, including shared data, race conditions, and coordination, and introduces solutions like mutexes, channels, condition variables, and wait groups. The lecture uses a web crawler example to illustrate threading concepts, comparing a serial crawler with concurrent versions using shared data and channels, and also addresses questions from the audience regarding asynchronous programming, the difference between threads and processes, context switching, race conditions, and memory management.