How Concurrency and Parallelism works in Golang [Tutorial]

Computer and software programs are useful because they do a lot of laborious work very fast and can also do multiple things at once. We want our programs to be able to do multiple things simultaneously, and the success of a programming language can depend on how easy it is to write and understand multitasking programs.

Concurrency and parallelism are two terms that are bound to come across often when looking into multitasking and are often used interchangeably. However, they mean two distinctly different things.

In this article, we will look at how concurrency and parallelism work in Go using simple examples for better understanding. Let's get started!

This article is an excerpt from a book 'Distributed Computing with Go' written by V.N. Nikhil Anurag.

The standard definitions given on the Go blog are as follows:

Concurrency: Concurrency is about dealing with lots of things at once. This means that we manage to get multiple things done at once in a given period of time. However, we will only be doing a single thing at a time. This tends to happen in programs where one task is waiting and the program decides to run another task in the idle time. In the following diagram, this is denoted by running the yellow task in idle periods of the blue task.

Parallelism: Parallelism is about doing lots of things at once. This means that even if we have two tasks, they are continuously working without any breaks in between them. In the diagram, this is shown by the fact that the green task is running independently and is not influenced by the red task in any manner:

It is important to understand the difference between these two terms. Let's look at a few concrete examples to further elaborate upon the difference between the two.

Concurrency

Let's look at the concept of concurrency using a simple example of a few daily routine tasks and the way we can perform them.

Imagine you start your day and need to get six things done:

Make hotel reservation

Book flight tickets

Order a dress

Pay credit card bills

Write an email

Listen to an audiobook

The order in which they are completed doesn't matter, and for some of the tasks, such as writing an email or listening to an audiobook, you need not complete them in a single sitting. Here is one possible way to complete the tasks:

Order a dress.

Write one-third of the email.

Make hotel reservation.

Listen to 10 minutes of audiobook.

Pay credit card bills.

Write another one-third of the email.

Book flight tickets.

Listen to another 20 minutes of audiobook.

Complete writing the email.

Continue listening to audiobook until you fall asleep.

In programming terms, we have executed the above tasks concurrently. We had a complete day and we chose particular tasks from our list of tasks and started to work on them. For certain tasks, we even decided to break them up into pieces and work on the pieces between other tasks.

We will eventually write a program which does all of the preceding steps concurrently, but let's take it one step at a time. Let's start by building a program that executes the tasks sequentially, and then modify it progressively until it is purely concurrent code and uses goroutines. The progression of the program will be in three steps:

Serial task execution.

Serial task execution with goroutines.

Concurrent task execution.

Code overview

The code will consist of a set of functions that print out their assigned tasks as completed. In the cases of writing an email or listening to an audiobook, we further divide the tasks into more functions. This can be seen as follows:

writeMail, continueWritingMail1, continueWritingMail2

listenToAudioBook, continueListeningToAudioBook

Serial task execution

Let's first implement a program that will execute all the tasks in a linear manner. Based on the code overview we discussed previously, the following code should be straightforward:

package main 
 
import ( 
    "fmt" 
) 
 
// Simple individual tasks 
func makeHotelReservation() { 
    fmt.Println("Done making hotel reservation.") 
} 
func bookFlightTickets() { 
    fmt.Println("Done booking flight tickets.") 
} 
func orderADress() { 
    fmt.Println("Done ordering a dress.") 
} 
func payCreditCardBills() { 
    fmt.Println("Done paying Credit Card bills.") 
} 
 
// Tasks that will be executed in parts 
 
// Writing Mail 
func writeAMail() { 
    fmt.Println("Wrote 1/3rd of the mail.") 
    continueWritingMail1() 
} 
func continueWritingMail1() { 
    fmt.Println("Wrote 2/3rds of the mail.") 
    continueWritingMail2() 
} 
func continueWritingMail2() { 
    fmt.Println("Done writing the mail.") 
} 
 
// Listening to Audio Book 
func listenToAudioBook() { 
    fmt.Println("Listened to 10 minutes of audio book.") 
    continueListeningToAudioBook() 
} 
func continueListeningToAudioBook() { 
    fmt.Println("Done listening to audio book.") 
} 
 
// All the tasks we want to complete in the day. 
// Note that we do not include the sub tasks here. 
var listOfTasks = []func(){ 
    makeHotelReservation, bookFlightTickets, orderADress, 
    payCreditCardBills, writeAMail, listenToAudioBook, 
} 
 
func main() { 
    for _, task := range listOfTasks { 
        task() 
    } 
}

We take each of the main tasks and start executing them in simple sequential order. Executing the preceding code should produce unsurprising output, as shown here:

Done making hotel reservation.
Done booking flight tickets.
Done ordering a dress.
Done paying Credit Card bills.
Wrote 1/3rd of the mail.
Wrote 2/3rds of the mail.
Done writing the mail.
Listened to 10 minutes of audio book.
Done listening to audio book.

Serial task execution with goroutines

We took a list of tasks and wrote a program to execute them in a linear and sequential manner. However, we want to execute the tasks concurrently! Let's start by first introducing goroutines for the split tasks and see how it goes. We will only show the code snippet where the code actually changed here:

/******************************************************************** 
  We start by making Writing Mail & Listening Audio Book concurrent. 
*********************************************************************/ 
// Tasks that will be executed in parts 
 
// Writing Mail 
func writeAMail() { 
    fmt.Println("Wrote 1/3rd of the mail.") 
    go continueWritingMail1()  // Notice the addition of 'go' keyword. 
} 
func continueWritingMail1() { 
    fmt.Println("Wrote 2/3rds of the mail.") 
    go continueWritingMail2()  // Notice the addition of 'go' keyword. 
} 
func continueWritingMail2() { 
    fmt.Println("Done writing the mail.") 
} 
 
// Listening to Audio Book 
func listenToAudioBook() { 
    fmt.Println("Listened to 10 minutes of audio book.") 
    go continueListeningToAudioBook()  // Notice the addition of 'go'   keyword. 
} 
func continueListeningToAudioBook() { 
    fmt.Println("Done listening to audio book.") 
}

The following is a possible output:

Done making hotel reservation.
Done booking flight tickets.
Done ordering a dress.
Done paying Credit Card bills.
Wrote 1/3rd of the mail.
Listened to 10 minutes of audio book.

Whoops! That's not what we were expecting. The output from the continueWritingMail1, continueWritingMail2, and continueListeningToAudioBook functions is missing; the reason being that we are using goroutines. Since goroutines are not waited upon, the code in the main function continues executing and once the control flow reaches the end of the main function, the program ends. What we would really like to do is to wait in the main function until all the goroutines have finished executing. There are two ways we can do this—using channels or using WaitGroup. We'll use WaitGroup now.

In order to use WaitGroup, we have to keep the following in mind:

Use WaitGroup.Add(int) to keep count of how many goroutines we will be running as part of our logic.

Use WaitGroup.Done() to signal that a goroutine is done with its task.

Use WaitGroup.Wait() to wait until all goroutines are done.

Pass WaitGroup instance to the goroutines so they can call the Done() method.

Based on these points, we should be able to modify the source code to use WaitGroup. The following is the updated code:

package main 
 
import ( 
    "fmt" 
    "sync" 
) 
 
// Simple individual tasks 
func makeHotelReservation(wg *sync.WaitGroup) { 
    fmt.Println("Done making hotel reservation.") 
    wg.Done()
} 
func bookFlightTickets(wg *sync.WaitGroup) { 
    fmt.Println("Done booking flight tickets.") 
    wg.Done() 
} 
func orderADress(wg *sync.WaitGroup) { 
    fmt.Println("Done ordering a dress.") 
    wg.Done() 
} 
func payCreditCardBills(wg *sync.WaitGroup) { 
    fmt.Println("Done paying Credit Card bills.") 
    wg.Done() 
} 
 
// Tasks that will be executed in parts 
 
// Writing Mail 
func writeAMail(wg *sync.WaitGroup) { 
    fmt.Println("Wrote 1/3rd of the mail.") 
    go continueWritingMail1(wg) 
} 
func continueWritingMail1(wg *sync.WaitGroup) { 
    fmt.Println("Wrote 2/3rds of the mail.") 
    go continueWritingMail2(wg) 
} 
func continueWritingMail2(wg *sync.WaitGroup) { 
    fmt.Println("Done writing the mail.") 
    wg.Done() 
} 
 
// Listening to Audio Book 
func listenToAudioBook(wg *sync.WaitGroup) { 
    fmt.Println("Listened to 10 minutes of audio book.") 
    go continueListeningToAudioBook(wg) 
} 
func continueListeningToAudioBook(wg *sync.WaitGroup) { 
    fmt.Println("Done listening to audio book.") 
    wg.Done() 
} 
 
// All the tasks we want to complete in the day. 
// Note that we do not include the sub tasks here. 
var listOfTasks = []func(*sync.WaitGroup){ 
    makeHotelReservation, bookFlightTickets, orderADress, 
    payCreditCardBills, writeAMail, listenToAudioBook, 
} 
 
func main() { 
    var waitGroup sync.WaitGroup 
    // Set number of effective goroutines we want to wait upon 
    waitGroup.Add(len(listOfTasks)) 
 
    for _, task := range listOfTasks{ 
        // Pass reference to WaitGroup instance 
        // Each of the tasks should call on WaitGroup.Done() 
        task(&waitGroup) 
    } 
    // Wait until all goroutines have completed execution. 
    waitGroup.Wait() 
}

Here is one possible output order; notice how continueWritingMail1 and continueWritingMail2 were executed at the end after listenToAudioBook and continueListeningToAudioBook:

Done making hotel reservation.
Done booking flight tickets.
Done ordering a dress.
Done paying Credit Card bills.
Wrote 1/3rd of the mail.
Listened to 10 minutes of audio book.
Done listening to audio book.
Wrote 2/3rds of the mail.
Done writing the mail.

Concurrent task execution

In the final output of the previous part, we can see that all the tasks in listOfTasks are being executed in serial order, and the last step for maximum concurrency would be to let the order be determined by Go runtime instead of the order in listOfTasks. This might sound like a laborious task, but in reality this is quite simple to achieve. All we need to do is add the go keyword in front of task(&waitGroup):

func main() { 
    var waitGroup sync.WaitGroup 
    // Set number of effective goroutines we want to wait upon 
    waitGroup.Add(len(listOfTasks)) 
 
    for _, task := range listOfTasks { 
        // Pass reference to WaitGroup instance 
        // Each of the tasks should call on WaitGroup.Done() 
        go task(&waitGroup) // Achieving maximum concurrency 
    } 
 
    // Wait until all goroutines have completed execution. 
    waitGroup.Wait()

Following is a possible output:

Listened to 10 minutes of audio book.
Done listening to audio book.
Done booking flight tickets.
Done ordering a dress.
Done paying Credit Card bills.
Wrote 1/3rd of the mail.
Wrote 2/3rds of the mail.
Done writing the mail.
Done making hotel reservation.

If we look at this possible output, the tasks were executed in the following order:

Listen to audiobook.

Book flight tickets.

Order a dress.

Pay credit card bills.

Write an email.

Make hotel reservations.

Now that we have a good idea on what concurrency is and how to write concurrent code using goroutines and WaitGroup, let's dive into parallelism.

Parallelism

Imagine that you have to write a few emails. They are going to be long and laborious, and the best way to keep yourself entertained is to listen to music while writing them, that is, listening to music "in parallel" to writing the emails. If we wanted to write a program that simulates this scenario, the following is one possible implementation:

package main 
 
import ( 
    "fmt" 
    "sync" 
    "time" 
) 
 
func printTime(msg string) { 
    fmt.Println(msg, time.Now().Format("15:04:05")) 
} 
 
// Task that will be done over time 
func writeMail1(wg *sync.WaitGroup) { 
    printTime("Done writing mail #1.") 
    wg.Done() 
} 
func writeMail2(wg *sync.WaitGroup) { 
    printTime("Done writing mail #2.") 
    wg.Done() 
} 
func writeMail3(wg *sync.WaitGroup) { 
    printTime("Done writing mail #3.") 
    wg.Done() 
} 
 
// Task done in parallel 
func listenForever() { 
    for { 
        printTime("Listening...") 
    } 
} 
 
func main() { 
    var waitGroup sync.WaitGroup 
    waitGroup.Add(3) 
 
    go listenForever() 
 
    // Give some time for listenForever to start 
    time.Sleep(time.Nanosecond * 10) 
 
    // Let's start writing the mails 
    go writeMail1(&waitGroup) 
    go writeMail2(&waitGroup) 
    go writeMail3(&waitGroup) 
 
    waitGroup.Wait() 
}

The output of the program might be as follows:

Done writing mail #3. 19:32:57
Listening... 19:32:57
Listening... 19:32:57
Done writing mail #1. 19:32:57
Listening... 19:32:57
Listening... 19:32:57
Done writing mail #2. 19:32:57

The numbers represent the time in terms of Hour:Minutes:Seconds and, as can be seen, they are being executed in parallel. You might have noticed that the code for parallelism looks almost identical to the code for the final concurrency example. However, in the function listenForever, we are printing Listening... in an infinite loop. If the preceding example was written without goroutines, the output would keep printing Listening... and never reach the writeMail function calls.

Goroutines are concurrent and, to an extent, parallel; however, we should think of them as being concurrent. The order of execution of goroutines is not predictable and we should not rely on them to be executed in any particular order.

We should also take care to handle errors and panics in our goroutines because even though they are being executed in parallel, a panic in one goroutine will crash the complete program. Finally, goroutines can block on system calls, however, this will not block the execution of the program nor slow down the performance of the overall program.

We looked at how goroutine can be used to run concurrent programs and also learned how parallelism works in Go.

If you found this post useful, do check out the book 'Distributed Computing with Go' to learn more about Goroutines, channels and messages, and other concepts in Go.

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