Demystifying Concurrency in Go: A Beginner’s Guide with Examples

Luis Soares
3 min readApr 24, 2023

Concurrency is an essential concept in modern programming, enabling the efficient execution of multiple tasks simultaneously.

Go, a statically typed programming language developed by Google, is known for its simple and efficient concurrency model.

In this article, we’ll provide a beginner-friendly explanation of concurrency in Go, including examples to help you understand and implement concurrent programming in your Go projects.

Concurrency vs Parallelism

Before we dive into Go’s concurrency model, it’s crucial to differentiate between concurrency and parallelism.

Concurrency is the ability of a program to manage multiple tasks at the same time, regardless of whether they’re executing simultaneously.

Parallelism involves running multiple tasks simultaneously, often on separate processors or cores.

While they share similarities, concurrency and parallelism are not the same.

Concurrency is a broader concept that encompasses parallelism.

Go focuses on concurrency, with parallelism as a possible outcome, depending on the hardware capabilities.

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Luis Soares

Lead Software Engineer | Blockchain & ZKP Protocol Engineer | 🦀 Rust | Web3 | Solidity | Golang | Cryptography | Author