GOLANG

Anatomy of goroutines in Go -Concurrency in Go

goroutine is a lightweight execution thread running in the background. goroutines are key ingredients to achieve concurrency in Go.

In the previous lesson, we learned about Go’s concurrency model. As goroutines are lightweight compared to OS threads, it is very common for a Go application to have thousands of goroutines running concurrently. Concurrency can speed up application significantly as well as help us write code with separation of concerns (SoC).

☛ What is a goroutine?

We understood in theory that how goroutine works, but in code, what is it? Well, a goroutine is simply a function or method that is running in background concurrently with other goroutines. It’s not a function or method definition that determines if it is a goroutine, it is determined by how we call it.

Go provides a special keyword go to create a goroutine. When we call a function or a method with go prefix, that function or method executes in a goroutine. Let’s see a simple example.