Advanced Golang

Concurrency

Go routines

In this lesson, we explore goroutines, a fundamental component in Go's powerful concurrency model. Goroutines are essentially lightweight threads that run concurrently, managed efficiently by the Go Runtime Scheduler. Understanding how to use goroutines is key to writing high-performance Go applications.

Understanding Goroutines

Goroutines enable you to execute functions or methods concurrently by using the special keyword go. When you prefix a function call with go, the function executes in its own goroutine. This allows the program to perform multiple tasks simultaneously without the overhead of traditional threading.

Note

If you omit the go keyword, the function executes as part of the main goroutine, following the standard sequential program flow.

Syntax Example

Below is an example demonstrating how to start a goroutine that calls the calculate function concurrently:

go calculate()

This example clearly shows that by placing the go keyword before the function call, the function is executed concurrently in a separate goroutine.

Summary

Goroutines are a cornerstone of Go's approach to concurrency, allowing efficient and easy parallel execution of code. By utilizing the simple syntax provided by the go keyword, developers can design applications that make effective use of multi-core systems and improve overall performance.

For further reading, consider exploring the following resources:

That concludes our discussion on goroutines.

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