This blog introduces concept of goroutines in, its definition.
What are Goroutines ?
Goroutines are functions or methods that run concurrently with other functions or methods. Goroutines can be thought of as lightweight threads. The cost of creating a Goroutine is tiny when compared to a thread. Hence it's common for Go applications to have thousands of Goroutines running concurrently.
Advantages of Goroutines
- Goroutines are extremely cheap when compared to threads. They are only a few kb in stack size and the stack can grow and shrink according to the needs of the application whereas in the case of threads the stack size has to be specified and is fixed.
- Goroutines communicate using channels. Channels by design prevent race conditions from happening when accessing shared memory using Goroutines. Channels can be thought of as a pipe using which Goroutines communicate.
Goroutines run in the same address space, so access to shared memory must be synchronized.