Go: Building Web Applications

Understanding goroutines versus coroutines

At this point, you may be thinking, "Ah, goroutines, I know these as coroutines." Well, yes and no.

A coroutine is a cooperative task control mechanism, but in its most simplistic sense, a coroutine is not concurrent. While coroutines and goroutines are utilized in similar ways, Go's focus on concurrency provides a lot more than just state control and yields. In the examples we've seen so far, we have what we can call dumb goroutines. Although they operate in the same time and address space, there's no real communication between the two. If you look at coroutines in other languages, you may find that they are often not necessarily concurrent or asynchronous, but rather they are step-based. They yield to ...