Comparison / Choose a boundary

Choose the mechanism for the failure.

A goroutine needs an owner and a way to finish. A bounded worker pool limits active work; cancellation must reach both producers and workers; joining them establishes that shutdown has actually completed.

This comparison separates the implementation pattern from the environment used to explore it. A general playground is useful for editing freely; this lab adds a fixed failure, a readable execution trace and a direct path from the result to its source.

Where each choice fits

Approach	Useful when	Tradeoff	Connection to this lab
Goroutine per message	Small bounded fan-out where lifetime and resource limits are already controlled.	Unbounded input becomes unbounded concurrency.	The deliberately broken case makes that pressure visible.
Bounded worker pool	Control active work and apply queue backpressure.	Queue size, waiting and rejection need an explicit policy.	The safeguarded engine uses this model.
Buffered result channel	Decouple a known number of sends from immediate receives.	Capacity is not a cancellation or ownership policy.	Compare it locally with a receiver that returns early.
Go browser WebAssembly	Click and run the actual engine without installing Go.	Browser scheduling is not native multicore execution.	The public environment uses this isolated target.
Native Go tests and loopback server	Exercise native scheduling, request contexts and race instrumentation.	Requires Go; race instrumentation also needs a supported C toolchain.	The matching source package supplies both.
A general Go playground	Explore a compact language example quickly.	A custom trace and failure controls still need to be designed.	Use focused snippets for language questions and this lab for the complete worker lifetime.

Compare the same input

Choose one scenario and predict the outcome.
Run it without safeguards and retain the visible result.
Change only the implementation, then run again.
Inspect the source responsible for the difference.
Name the guarantee that changed and the guarantee that remains outside the experiment.

The browser runs the same Go engine compiled to WebAssembly inside a dedicated worker. Goroutines run concurrently, but this browser target is not a multicore throughput benchmark. A harness cleans up the deliberately blocked example after recording it. The native download includes an HTTP adapter and Go tests.

Run the comparison