What is concurrency and parallelism in go language?
Go has strong support for concurrency and parallelism, making it well-suited for developing applications that need to perform multiple tasks simultaneously. Concurrency is the ability to have multiple independent units of execution (goroutines in Go) that share the same address space, while parallelism is the ability to execute these units of execution simultaneously across multiple physical or virtual CPUs.
Go provides several features to support concurrency and parallelism, including:
Goroutines: Goroutines are lightweight threads of execution that can be created and managed by the Go runtime. They are cheap to create and use very little memory, making it possible to have many goroutines running concurrently. Goroutines communicate and synchronize with each other using channels, which are typed channels that allow for communication between goroutines.
Channels: Channels are a core feature of Go's concurrency model, allowing goroutines to communicate with each other and synchronize their actions. Channels are typed, so they can only transmit values of a specified type. Channels can be unbuffered (blocking) or buffered (non-blocking), depending on the use case.
The **sync** package: The **sync** package provides several synchronization primitives, including **Mutex**, **RWMutex**, and **WaitGroup**, that allow for coordination between goroutines. For example, **Mutex** and **RWMutex** can be used to protect shared resources from concurrent access, while **WaitGroup** can be used to wait for a group of goroutines to finish.
The **context** package: The **context** package provides a way to manage the lifecycle of a request or operation across multiple goroutines. A context can be used to pass request-scoped values, cancel a request, or set deadlines.
The **go** keyword: The **go** keyword allows a function to be executed as a goroutine. The function is executed concurrently with the rest of the program and does not block the calling goroutine.
The **select** statement: The **select** statement allows a goroutine to wait for multiple channel operations to complete simultaneously. It provides a way to handle non-deterministic events in a concise and readable way.
These features make it easy to write concurrent and parallel programs in Go, without the risk of race conditions or deadlocks that can occur in other programming languages. As a result, Go is widely used for developing high-performance network services, distributed systems, and other applications that require efficient concurrency and parallelism.