Introduction to Goroutines for Concurrency

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Introduction to Goroutines for Concurrency

Goroutines are lightweight threads managed by the Go runtime, enabling concurrent execution. Simply prefix a function call with 'go' to run it concurrently. Unlike parallel processing (using multiple CPU cores), concurrent processing through goroutines allows a single CPU to handle multiple tasks by switching between them. The scheduler handles switching automatically.

snippet.go
go
package main
 
import (
    "fmt"
    "time"
)
 
func main() {
    fmt.Println("Start of program")
 
 
    go say("Hello", 3)
    go say("Go", 3)
 
 
    time.Sleep(time.Second * 2)
    fmt.Println("End of program")
}
 
 
func say(word string, count int) {
    for i := 0; i < count; i++ {
        fmt.Println(word)
        time.Sleep(time.Millisecond * 100)
    }
}

Breakdown

go say("Hello", 3)

The 'go' keyword launches the function as a goroutine - runs independently and concurrently

time.Sleep(time.Second * 2)

Sleep pauses execution for the specified duration, allowing goroutines to complete

go func() { }()

Anonymous goroutine - useful for quick concurrent operations without defining a function

fmt.Println(word)

Each goroutine prints independently, output order may vary due to scheduling

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Introduction to Goroutines for Concurrency

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