Why goroutines instead of threads?
Goroutines are part of making concurrency easy to use. The idea, which has been around for a while, is to multiplex independently executing functions—coroutines, really—onto a set of threads. When a coroutine blocks, such as by calling a blocking system call, the run-time automatically moves other coroutines on the same operating system thread to a different, runnable thread so they won’t be blocked. The programmer sees none of this, which is the point. The result, which we call goroutines, can be very cheap: unless they spend a lot of time in long-running system calls, they cost little more than the memory for the stack. To make the stacks small, Go’s run-time uses segmented stacks. A newly minted goroutine is given a few kilobytes, which is almost always enough. When it isn’t, the run-time allocates (and frees) extension segments automatically. The overhead averages about three cheap instructions per function call. It is practical to create hundreds of thousands of goroutines in the
