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Concurrency is not Parallelism by Rob Pike

gnbitcom
Talks
YouTube
4 HN users recommended this talk4 months2021–2025 score 4.5
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026

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

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.

“here's an excellent talk on the same subject by Rob Pike that I link all the time to people” (HN, 2024)

1 strong recommendations · 3 recommendations · 2 citations · Talks · intermediate

6 Hacker News comments

From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.

@merb Jun 2021 Recommends
on HN thread Althttpd: Simple webserver in a single C file
yeah, basically. a lot of people do not know, but async/await does have NOTHING do to with threads or processes. you can use threads with async/await, but you do not. async/await basically means you are running your "green threads"/tasks/promises on a event loop, the event loop can be either single threaded or it can run the stuff on multiple threads. a lot of people just did not get the difference between concurrency vs. parallelism. threads and processes are basically parallelism, while concurrency is async programming. good talk about that stuff from rob pike (go): [this video]
Rob Pike explains the difference between concurrency and parallelism.
@cratermoon Oct 2022 Recommends
on HN thread Ask HN: Kubernetes Worth It?
Anyone that can wrap their mind around the model of Communicating Sequential Processes[1] implemented using channels in Go will improve their programming. See also Concurrency is not Parallelism by Rob Pike: [this video] After I figured it out, I spent a good month writing personal projects to play with channels and concurrency and get the "these are cool I'm going to use them everywhere" urge out of my system. 1 [link]
Pike on Go channels and concurrency model.
@auxiliarymoose Dec 2025 Recommends
on HN thread Thoughts on Go vs. Rust vs. Zig
Agreed. Rob Pike presented a good talk "Concurrency is not Parallelism" which explains the motivations behind Go's concurrency model: [this video] Between the lack of "colored functions" and the simplicity of communicating with channels, I keep surprising myself with how (relatively) quick and easy it is to develop concurrent systems with correct behavior in Go.
Explains motivations behind Go's concurrency model.

Citations, criticism and jokes

@duped Dec 2021 Cites it
on HN thread Async I/O for Dummies (2018)
As with all benchmarks, benchmark your workload. The tech empower stuff is gamed, like all rankings. But first and foremost, concurrency is not parallelism [1]. In my practical experience dealing with both, asycn is a language semantic for concurrency, threads are an OS feature for parallelism. It's a little nonsensical to ask the pros/cons since they are different entirely ; you can use both at the same time (and in practice most async implementations use threads) [1] [this video] "Concurrency is not Parallelism" talk by Rob Pike.
Cited for distinction between concurrency and parallelism.
@ly3xqhl8g9 Mar 2023 Cites it
on HN thread What Is Systems Programming, Really?
Sure, but the context is very important: you can use Rust to control the DOM from WASM [1] and then you can use Haskell to write a load balancer [2]. [1] [link] [2] [link] (off-topic: Rob Pike's Concurrency is not Parallelism [this video] )

Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.

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