gochan-life

Game of life implemented with goroutines and channels

Why?

Because I wanted to see what that would look like.

So, how deos this differ from every other implementation out there?

Channels drive all the interactions. Each node in the game is a goroutine and it is connected to its neighbors via channels.

The main engine function looks like this:

func Run (state int,
          nw, n, ne, e, se, s, sw, w <-chan int,
          NW, N, NE, E, SE, S, SW, W chan<- int,
          Out chan<- Status) {

  // Start computation.
  for {
    // First, write our status
    NW <- state
    N  <- state
    NE <- state
    E  <- state
    SE <- state
    S  <- state
    SW <- state
    W  <- state

    // Count the state values coming in
    count := <-nw + <-n + <-ne + <-e + <-se + <-s + <-sw + <-w

    // Report to output
    Out <- Status { state > 0, count }

    // Determine our new state
    if state == 0 {
      if count == 3 {
        state = 1
      }
    } else {
      if count != 2 && count != 3 {
        state = 0
      }
    }
  }
}

So, how did it perform?

On my 1GB single core (i7) VM:

Columns	Rows	Nodes	FPS	%RAM (via top)
78	20	1560	488	1.2%
160	20	3200	193	2.6%
160	50	8000	69	6.2%
160	100	16000	33	11.1%
160	140	22400	22	~24%
500	100	50000	6	~45%

Beyond that I'd start getting memory failures, etc. Plus, I think there's a leak in the code somewhere.

It was intended to max out a core.

Can I run this wihtout Go?

Got Docker? Then yes you can. Just run:

docker run --rm rharkins/gochan-life [columns] [rows]

I want to build my own Docker image with this. How do I do it?

First, install Docker. Next,

make build-image

It will download and build the gochan-life image. To run it:

make run-image

Or:

make run-image WIDTH=[width] HEIGHT=[height]

To tag your own version and push to Docker:

git tag gochan-life MYPREFIX/gochan-life
git push MYPREFIX/gochan-life