Coroutines and Go

[steve donovan <steve.j.donovan@...>]

http://golang.org/doc/go_lang_faq.html

A most interesting paragraph:

[[
Goroutines are part of making concurrency easy to use. The idea, which
has been around for a while, is to multiplex independently executing
functions—coroutines, really—onto a set of threads. When a coroutine
blocks, such as by calling a blocking system call, the run-time
automatically moves other coroutines on the same operating system
thread to a different, runnable thread so they won't be blocked. The
programmer sees none of this, which is the point. The result, which we
call goroutines, can be very cheap: unless they spend a lot of time in
long-running system calls, they cost little more than the memory for
the stack.
]]

We obviously don't need to be convinced about coroutines, but the idea
of moving blocked ones to another thread is intriguing.

steve d.