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Google I/O 2012 - Go Concurrency Patterns

Google for Developers · 894.2K views · 2012-07-02 · 51:27

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Overview

Rob Pike's Google I/O 2012 talk shows how goroutines and channels solve tricky concurrency problems with simple Go code. It features a playful goroutine demo with gophers passing messages and a search engine example.

On Hacker News

The canonical recommendation for learning Go concurrency, praised as entertaining and clarifying when to use channels versus mutexes.

Recommended by 9 HN people across 9 months · HN mentions 2012–2025

Topics

C, C++, Rust, Go & systems languagesDistributed systems
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rob pikegoroutineschannelsgolangcsp

What people said

canthonytucci · 2013-09 · Strong recommendation

For those who don't know who Rob Pike is, he's pretty awesome, helped create UTF-8 among other things, and now works on Go. [LINK] He has given some really great Go talks which are available on youtube, about an hour each: Origins of Go Concurrency Style - [LINK] Lexical Scanning in Go - [LINK] Go Concurrency Patterns (One of my favorites) - [VIDEO]

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mseepgood · 2012-07 · Strong recommendation

Great talk by Rob Pike: [VIDEO] "Go Concurrency Patterns" with cute little gophers playing Chinese whispers with megaphones

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pbohun · 2025-11 · Recommendation

Not quite. Erlang uses the Actor model which delivers messages asynchronously to named processes. In Go, messages are passed between goroutines via channels, which provide a synchronization mechanism (when un-buffered). The ability to synchronize allow one to setup a "rhythm" to computation that the Actor model is explicitly not designed to do. Also, note that a process must know its consumer in the Actor model, but goroutines do not need to know their consumer in the CSP model. Channels can even be passed around to other goroutines! Each have their own pros and cons. You can see some of the legends who invented different methods of concurrency here: [LINK] There's also a nice talk Rob Pike gave that illustrated some very useful concurrency patterns that can be built using the CSP model: [VIDEO]

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Sources

Video by Google for Developers, played through YouTube.

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