What is the difference between golang goroutines and threads?

There are differences between Golang goroutines and threads in the way they implement concurrency.

1. Lightweight: Golang goroutines are a lightweight way to implement concurrency, with much smaller overhead for creation and destruction compared to threads. A program can create thousands of goroutines simultaneously without much performance impact, while the overhead for creating and destroying threads is relatively larger.
2. Memory usage: Go routines consume less memory than threads. The initial stack size of each coroutine is only a few KB and automatically grows as needed, while the stack size of threads is usually fixed around a few MB.
3. Scheduling: The scheduling of Golang goroutines is automatically managed by the Go runtime system, so developers do not need to schedule them manually. Goroutine scheduling is user-space based, meaning the overhead of switching between goroutines is very low. In contrast, thread scheduling is managed by the operating system kernel, resulting in higher switch overhead for threads.
4. Concurrent model: Golang goroutines use a communication-based concurrent model, communicating and synchronizing between goroutines through channels. This model makes it easier to achieve concurrency safety, avoiding the race condition problems of traditional thread shared data. Threads typically use shared memory for concurrent programming, requiring developers to handle synchronization and mutual exclusion themselves.

In conclusion, Golang goroutines are lighter, more efficient, and easier to program compared to threads. In Golang, goroutines are a powerful and convenient tool for concurrent programming.