alt Hacker NewsIMO, Kotlin coroutines are better of Go's goroutines, although they are a little different beasts to compare honestly (apples and oranges). Go inits goroutines on stack, but min size is 4KiB, so it's not trivial to grow them. Also you need to watch over and destruct goroutines manually to prevent memory leaks (using
var wg = sync.WaitGroup
defer wg.wait()
wg.Add(1)
go func() {
defer wg.Done()
}
And create a separate channel to return errors from a goroutine. Definitely more work.
Replies
Ternari • today at 3:17 AM
>you need to watch over and destruct goroutines manually to prevent memory leaks
No, you don’t. Any stack-allocated resources are freed when the function returns. WaitGroup is just there for synchronization.
zadikian • today at 12:18 AM
It is, but your typical backend code isn't dealing with that most of the time. You can just use blocking I/O in handlers.
Kotlin coroutines don't really exist. They're a (very neat) programming trick to support coroutine-like behavior on the JVM which doesn't support coroutines. If you look at the bytecode it produces, it honestly is a mess. And it colours your functions too: now you have be ever careful that if your function is running in a coroutine, there are certain things you should absolutely avoid doing in that function, or any function called by that function (like spinning the CPU on loop without yielding). In Go, you don't have to worry about any of this because the concurrency is built-in from the start.
Also I don't understand "it's not trivial to grow them". It is trivial to grow them, and that's why Go went this way. Maybe only 0.1% or fewer of use-cases will ever find any issues with the resizing stack (in fact probably the majority of uses are fine within the default starting stack size).