Go Concurrency

What is the difference between concurrency and parallelism

Concurrency is two lines of customers ordering from a single cashier (lines take turns ordering);

Parallelism is two lines of customers ordering from two cashiers (each line gets its own cashier)

Goroutine

• Independently executing function, launched by a go statement
• Has its own call stack, which grows and shrinks as required
• Very cheap
• Not a thread (a very cheap thread)
• There might be only one thread in a program with thousands of goroutines
• Goroutines are multiplexed dynamically onto threads as needed to keep all the goroutines running

Channels

• Provides a connection between two goroutines, allowing them to communicate

    // Declaring and initializing.
    var c chan int
    c = make(chan int)
    // or
    c := make(chan int)
    // Sending on a channel.
    c <- 1
    // Receiving from a channel.
    // The "arrow" indicates the direction of data flow.
    value = <-c

Select

• Provides another way to handle multiple channels
• It's like a switch, but each case is a communication
• All channels are evaluated
• Selection blocks until one communication can proceed
• If multiple can proceed, select chooses pseudo-randomly
• A default clause, if present, executes immediately if no channel is ready

select {
    case v1 := <-c1:
        fmt.Printf("received %v from c1\n", v1)
    case v2 := <-c2:
        fmt.Printf("received %v from c2\n", v1)
    case c3 <- 23:
        fmt.Printf("sent %v to c3\n", 23)
    default:
        fmt.Printf("no one was ready to communicate\n")
    }