Performance gains with goroutines

Programming Snapshot – goroutines

Article from Issue 219/2019
Author(s):

In the Go language, program parts that run simultaneously synchronize and communicate natively via channels. Mike Schilli whips up a parallel web fetcher to demonstrate the concept.

I often wonder why some developers seem committed to designing new programming languages. Of course, the young guns today are all hungry for slight improvements in the syntax, while hipsters enthuse over smart ideas for compact code. But the effort of building an ecosystem and setting up a community is immense!

Alas, since processors stopped running faster every year some time ago and only simulate more speed with cores running in parallel, one thing is very important: Your choice of language has to be able to coordinate parallel program parts easily. When I visited the WhatsApp team at Facebook in Menlo Park after work a few months ago, I learned what the secret of the small team's success was when they used a handful of machines to text millions of users. They used the old-fashioned Erlang language, which has parallelism as a native feature.

It's the same with Go. The smart people at Google have not only built process management and threading into the programming language, but also have added new primitives such as goroutines and channels, thus not only making concurrency available, but an integral part of the language.

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