Goroutines

Imagine several people have some nails to hammer into a wall. Each person has a different number of nails and a different area of the wall, but there is only one hammer. Each person uses the hammer for one nail, then passes the hammer to the next person, and so on. The person with the fewest nails will finish earlier but they will all share the same hammer; this is how Goroutines work.

Using Goroutines, Go allows multiple tasks to run at the same time (they are also called coroutines). These are routines (read tasks) that can co-run inside the same process but are totally concurrent. Goroutines do not share memory, which is why they are different from threads. However, we will see how easy it is to pass variables across them in your code, and how this might lead to some unexpected behavior.

Writing a Goroutine is nothing special; they are just normal functions. Actually, each function can easily become a Goroutine; all we have to do is to write the word go before calling...