Concurrency is not parallelism
16 Jan 2013
Tags: concurrency, talk, video

Andrew Gerrand

* Introduction

If there's one thing most people know about Go, is that it is designed for concurrency. No introduction to Go is complete without a demonstration of its goroutines and channels.

But when people hear the word _concurrency_ they often think of _parallelism_, a related but quite distinct concept. In programming, concurrency is the _composition_ of independently executing processes, while parallelism is the simultaneous _execution_ of (possibly related) computations. Concurrency is about _dealing_with_ lots of things at once. Parallelism is about _doing_ lots of things at once.

To clear up this conflation, Rob Pike gave a talk at [[http://heroku.com/][Heroku]]'s [[http://waza.heroku.com/][Waza]] conference entitled _Concurrency_is_not_parallelism_, and a video recording of the talk was released a few months ago.

.iframe http://player.vimeo.com/video/49718712?badge=0 281 500

The slides are available at [[http://talks.golang.org/2012/waza.slide][talks.golang.org]] (use the left and right arrow keys to navigate).

To learn about Go's concurrency primitives, watch [[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6kdp27TYZs][Go concurrency patterns]] ([[http://talks.golang.org/2012/concurrency.slide][slides]]).
