Vector clock support for Go

One more Go library oriented towards building distributed systems hot off the presses: govclock. This one offers full vector clock support for the Go language. Vector clocks allow recording and analyzing the inherent partial ordering of events in a distributed system in a comfortable way.

The following features are offered by govclock, in addition to basic event tracking:

• Compact serialization and deserialization
• Flexible truncation (min/max entries, min/max update time)
• Unit-independent update times
• Traditional merging
• Fast and memory efficient

If you’d like to know more about vector clocks, the Basho guys did a great job in the following pair of blog posts:

• Why vector clocks are easy
• Why vector clocks are hard

The following sample program demonstrates some sequential and concurrent events, dumping and loading, as well as merging of clocks. For more details, please look at the web page. The project is available under a BSD license.

package main

import (
    "launchpad.net/govclock"
    "fmt"
)

func main() {
    vc1 := govclock.New()
    vc1.Update([]byte("A"), 1)

    vc2 := vc1.Copy()
    vc2.Update([]byte("B"), 0)

    fmt.Println(vc2.Compare(vc1, govclock.Ancestor))   // => true
    fmt.Println(vc1.Compare(vc2, govclock.Descendant)) // => true

    vc1.Update([]byte("C"), 5)


    fmt.Println(vc1.Compare(vc2, govclock.Descendant)) // => false
    fmt.Println(vc1.Compare(vc2, govclock.Concurrent)) // => true

    vc2.Merge(vc1)

    fmt.Println(vc1.Compare(vc2, govclock.Descendant)) // => true

    data := vc2.Bytes()
    fmt.Printf("%#vn", string(data))
    // => "x01x01x01x01Ax01x01x01Bx01x00x01C"

    vc3, err := govclock.FromBytes(data)
    if err != nil { panic(err.String()) }

    fmt.Println(vc3.Compare(vc2, govclock.Equal))      // => true
}