When you think about it, threads are a strange abstraction.

From the programmer’s point of view, threads are great. It’s as if you can create virtual CPUs, on the fly, and the operating system will take care of simulating these virtual CPUs on top of real ones.

But on an implementation level, what is a simple abstraction can lead you, the programmer, into a trap. You don’t have an infinite number of CPUs and applying threaded abstractions in an unbounded manner invites you to overwhelm the real CPU if you try to actually use all these virtual CPUs simultaneously, or overwhelm the address space if they sit idle due to the overhead needed to maintain the illusion.

Careful tuning of one or both of the number of threads in use by the program, or the amount of memory each thread is allocated is needed whenever threads as a concurrency primitive are used in anger. So much for abstraction.

Go’s goroutines sit right in the middle, the same programmer interface as threads, a nice imperative coding model, but also efficient implementation model based on coroutines.