Go: What Does a Goroutine Switch Actually Involve?

Illustration created for “A Journey With Go”, made from the original Go Gopher, created by Renee French.

ℹ️ This article is based on Go 1.13.

Goroutines are light; they just need a memory stack of 2Kb to run. They are also cheap to run; switching a goroutine to another one does not require many operations. Before jumping into the switch itself, let’s review how the switch works at a higher level.