[ben0x539]

I figure the main feature of goroutines is that it is considered acceptable, for whatever reason, that a library function spawns helper goroutines without telling you (as long as it reigns them in somehow and they don't leak or anything weird like that). If eg. a random C or rust library spawned threads for random tasks without explicitly being a concurrency thing, it would probably raise a lot more eyebrows, no?

In the end this is probably because of the possibly superstitious belief that goroutines are free whereas threads need to be carefully budgeted for, and maybe somewhere between premature optimizations and designing for very niche scalability requirement, but subjectively the result is still that goroutines are "available" in a lot more situations than boring, pedestrian OS-level threads.

I feel like that counts as a semantic difference, even if might be social more than technical.