Are Go Goroutines Truly Coroutines?

Are Go Goroutines Coroutines?

In a presentation at Google I/O 2012, Rob Pike mentioned that multiple goroutines can coexist within a single thread, prompting questions about their implementation and similarities to coroutines.

Definition of a Coroutine

Coroutines are typically characterized by programmers explicitly transferring control between them, seamlessly suspending and resuming their execution.

Nature of Go Goroutines

Go goroutines, on the other hand, implicitly surrender control at unspecified moments during their execution, such as when waiting for I/O completion or channel interactions. This differs from explicit control transfer in coroutines.

Shared State and Communication

While goroutines lack explicit control transfer, they rely on shared state and communication via channels to simulate the sequential execution of multiple lightweight processes. This approach circumvents the entanglement often encountered in coroutine-based and event-driven programming.

Implementation of Goroutines

Based on the concept of "State Threads," goroutines leverage low-level communication with the OS kernel, eliminating the need for external dependencies like libc.

Benefits of Implicit Control Transfer

Implicit control transfer allows goroutines to behave like state threads, balancing the determinism of coroutines with the efficiency of preemptive multitasking in OS threads. This intentional design choice benefits the programming workflow by simplifying logic and reducing code complexity.

Conclusion

While goroutines share similarities with coroutines, their unique characteristics, such as implicit control transfer and shared-state communication, offer distinct advantages for programming concurrent applications in Go.

The above is the detailed content of Are Go Goroutines Truly Coroutines?. For more information, please follow other related articles on the PHP Chinese website!