Goroutines are a fundamental concept in the Go programming language, designed to enable concurrency within applications. They can be thought of as functions or methods that run concurrently with other functions or methods within the same address space of a Go program. Unlike traditional threads, goroutines are managed by the Go runtime rather than the operating system, making them much more lightweight and cost-effective in terms of memory and setup time[1][2][3][4][6][12][14].
When a function is invoked as a goroutine using the go keyword, it starts running independently in a concurrent manner. This means that the program does not wait for the goroutine to complete and continues executing the next lines of code immediately. For example, if a goroutine is responsible for handling a network request, the main program can continue running other tasks without waiting for the network request to complete[1][3][4][6].
Goroutines are scheduled by the Go runtime and run on top of operating system threads. Multiple goroutines may run on a single OS thread, and if one goroutine blocks, such as waiting for I/O, others continue to run. The Go runtime handles the multiplexing of goroutines onto threads efficiently[1][2][3][4][6][10].
One of the key advantages of goroutines is their efficiency in handling thousands of concurrent operations. They use a small amount of stack memory that grows and shrinks according to needs, which is far less than the fixed stack size allocated for traditional threads. This makes goroutines highly scalable for high-concurrency...
