| --- |
| title: Concurrency is not parallelism |
| date: 2013-01-16 |
| by: |
| - Andrew Gerrand |
| tags: |
| - concurrency |
| - talk |
| - video |
| summary: Watch Rob Pike's talk, _Concurrency is not parallelism._ |
| --- |
| |
| |
| 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 conference entitled |
| [_Concurrency is not parallelism_](https://blog.heroku.com/concurrency_is_not_parallelism), |
| and a video recording of the talk was released a few months ago. |
| |
| {{video "https://www.youtube.com/embed/oV9rvDllKEg" 500 281}} |
| |
| The slides are available at [go.dev/talks](/talks/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](/talks/2012/concurrency.slide)). |
