What Is Structured Concurrency and How Go Approaches It

Structured concurrency is a programming model where a parent goroutine waits for all its child goroutines to finish before it exits, ensuring no goroutines are left running after the parent completes. Go does not enforce this automatically but provides primitives like sync.WaitGroup and context.Context to implement it manually.

var wg sync.WaitGroup
ctx, cancel := context.WithCancel(context.Background())

wg.Add(1)
go func() {
    defer wg.Done()
    // do work
}()

wg.Wait()
cancel()

Structured concurrency means that if a parent task finishes, all its child tasks must also finish or be stopped. It prevents background tasks from running forever after the main program ends. Think of it like a manager who won't leave the office until every employee on their team has clocked out.