What is a Go Routine?

When we develop in Go, even more when we need to do a lot of treatments in a short time, do multithreading can be really useful. And it's in this context that we will talk about Go Routines.

Definition

A Go Routine is a method which can be executed in a thread in parallel of the main thread.

How to use it

1. Declare a function which could be used by a Go Routine

func toto(from string) {
    for i := 0; i < 3; i++ {
        fmt.Println(from, ":", i)
    }
}

As you can see, you haven't something particular to add to a function declaration to make it usable by a Go Routine.

2. Call the function as a Go Routine

To call a function as a Go Routine, you just need to add go before the function call.

// Call the function as a Go Routine
go toto("goroutine")

// Direct function call
toto("direct")

3. Result

With the previous example, we can see that the Go Routine is called before the direct call. Let's see what the output is.

direct : 0
direct : 1
direct : 2
goroutine : 0
goroutine : 1
goroutine : 2

We can see that "direct" call has been done before "goroutine". It shows us that the go routine was done in parallel, and a bit later than the direct call.

4. Anonymous functions

With Go Routines, we can create anonymous functions. This kind of function doesn't have a name and can't be called outside of the place where it was declared.

go func(msg string) {
        fmt.Println(msg)
    }("test")

In this example, we can see a function which prints the message given in parameter, and the direct call of this function with "test" as parameter value.

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Conclusion

To conclude this post, we can see that Go Routines are an easy way to do multithreading in Go. In a following post, we will see another Go feature which generally use Go Routines and which gives a powerful tool without external libraries, tools or plugins!

I hope it will help you! 🍺

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