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Concurrency is not Parallelism by Rob Pike

gnbitcom · talk · Watch on YouTube

C, C++, Rust, Go & systems languagesSoftware architecture & design

What it is

Rob Pike's Go talk distinguishing concurrency, the structuring of independent processes, from parallelism, their simultaneous execution. It uses Go channels and goroutines to illustrate.

Why Hacker News recommends it

The standard link for explaining the concurrency versus parallelism distinction and the motivations behind Go's concurrency model.

  • 4 people recommended it
  • 4 different months
  • 1 strong recommendations
  • first 2021, last 2025

What HN commenters said

  1. “here's an excellent talk on the same subject by Rob Pike that I link all the time to people”

    Excellent talk on concurrency vs parallelism, frequently shared.

    duped, 2024-09 · Strong recommendation · in “Understanding Concurrency, Parallelism and JavaScript”

  2. “good talk about that stuff from rob pike (go)”

    Rob Pike explains the difference between concurrency and parallelism.

    merb, 2021-06 · Recommendation · in “Althttpd: Simple webserver in a single C file”

  3. “See also Concurrency is not Parallelism by Rob Pike”

    Pike on Go channels and concurrency model.

    cratermoon, 2022-10 · Recommendation · in “Ask HN: Kubernetes Worth It?”

  4. “Rob Pike presented a good talk "Concurrency is not Parallelism" which explains the motivations behind Go's concurrency model”

    Explains motivations behind Go's concurrency model.

    auxiliarymoose, 2025-12 · Recommendation · in “Thoughts on Go vs. Rust vs. Zig”

Excerpts from Hacker News comments, linked to the originals. Summaries and labels were written by a language model from those comments.

Topics: concurrency, parallelism, go, goroutines, rob pike

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