The Go Programming Language

9.8 Goroutines and Threads

In the previous chapter we said that the difference between goroutines and operating system (OS) threads could be ignored until later. Although the differences between them are essentially quantitative, a big enough quantitative difference becomes a qualitative one, and so it is with goroutines and threads. The time has now come to distinguish them.

9.8.1 Growable Stacks

Each OS thread has a fixed-size block of memory (often as large as 2MB) for its stack, the work area where it saves the local variables of function calls that are in progress or temporarily suspended while another function is called. This fixed-size stack is simultaneously too much and too little. A 2MB stack would be a huge waste of memory for ...