Introduction to Goroutines

Let's get started with concurrency in Go by learning the basics of goroutines!

We'll cover the following

A goroutine is a function or a method which is executed concurrently with the rest of the program.

Syntax

You can create a goroutine by using the following syntax:

Yes, it is that simple!

The current goroutine evaluates the input parameters to the functions/methods which are executed in the new goroutines. Even our main() function is a goroutine which was invoked by the implicitly created goroutine managed by Go runtime.

Example

Let’s look at an example:

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package main
import "fmt"
func WelcomeMessage(){
    fmt.Println("Welcome to Educative!")
}
func main() {
  go WelcomeMessage()
  fmt.Println("Hello World!")
}

You can never be sure about the output of the above program. Sometimes it is just Hello World! while at other times the output may show both the strings Welcome to Educative! and Hello World! but in a different order.

Keep running the code and I hope you see the different kinds of output that the program generates.

Now let’s discuss what was actually happening in the above program. On line 9, we create a goroutine which executes the function WelcomeMessage() concurrently. The program then moves to line 10 and executes fmt.Println("Hello World!"). Remember here that the goroutine executing WelcomeMessage() was also running concurrently so whether you see Hello World! first or Welcome to Educative! depends on which code finishes first. But what happens when we only have Hello World! as the output?

Recall that the main function is also a kind of goroutine, so when fmt.Println("Hello World!") executes, the main goroutine finishes and we exit the program regardless of what other goroutines might be doing in the background. Hence, we don’t see the output from the WelcomeMessage() goroutine as the program exits even before the WelcomeMessage() function has finished.

Let’s make this concept more clear in another example:

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package main
import "fmt"
func WelcomeMessage(){
    fmt.Println("Welcome to Educative!")
}
func main() {
  go WelcomeMessage()
  go func(){  
    fmt.Println("Hello World!")
  }()
}

So no output, huh? If you try to figure it out, you’ll realize that the main goroutine again finished causing the program to exit before we could get the results from the goroutines on line 9 and line 10. Let us now pause our main goroutine and give the other goroutines time to finish as shown in the example below.

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package main
import (
  "fmt"
  "time"
)
func WelcomeMessage(){
    fmt.Println("Welcome to Educative!")
}
func main() {
  go WelcomeMessage()
  go func(){  
    fmt.Println("Hello World!")
  }()
  time.Sleep(time.Millisecond*200)
}

Now you can see the results from both goroutines we created in the main because we used the time.Sleep() function to cause a time delay which allows other goroutines to finish before we exit the program.

You might have realized that this is not an efficient solution but we will solve this problem by using wait groups from the sync package in the upcoming lessons.

As you are now familiar with the basics of goroutines, we’ll dive deeper into what is happening behind the scenes in the next lesson!