What is a goroutine in Go? How is it different from a thread?

In Go, a goroutine is a lightweight thread managed by the Go runtime. It’s different from a thread in several ways:

  1. Goroutines are multiplexed onto a smaller number of OS threads, allowing efficient use of system resources.
  2. Goroutines have a smaller stack size than threads, which reduces memory usage and allows for many more goroutines to be created.
  3. Goroutines are managed by the Go runtime, which handles scheduling, synchronization, and garbage collection, making it easier to write concurrent code.
  4. Goroutines are cheaper to create and destroy than threads, which makes it practical to use them for tasks that would be too expensive to perform with threads.

To create a goroutine, you simply add the keyword go in front of a function call:

func main() {

    go myFunc() // start a new goroutine

}

func myFunc() {

    // do something

}

In this example, myFunc() is executed concurrently in a new goroutine. The main() function continues to execute concurrently with myFunc().

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