| # 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)). |
