# Concurrency is not parallelism
16 Jan 2013
Tags: concurrency, talk, video
Summary: Watch Rob Pike's talk, _Concurrency is not parallelism._
OldURL: /concurrency-is-not-parallelism

Andrew Gerrand

##

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 [Heroku](http://heroku.com/)'s
[Waza](http://waza.heroku.com/) conference entitled _Concurrency is not parallelism_,
and a video recording of the talk was released a few months ago.

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

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

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