Is it possible to programmatically control the number of processes launched in the Go runtime environment?

Yes, in Go, you can programmatically control the number of operating system threads (scheduler processes) used to execute goroutines. This is done using the function runtime.GOMAXPROCS(n), where n is the desired number of threads.

By default, GOMAXPROCS is set to the number of logical CPUs on the machine, but it can be changed at runtime, for example:

import (
    "fmt"
    "runtime"
)

func main() {
    fmt.Println("Default GOMAXPROCS:", runtime.GOMAXPROCS(0)) // get current value
    runtime.GOMAXPROCS(4) // set number of threads to 4
    fmt.Println("Updated GOMAXPROCS:", runtime.GOMAXPROCS(0))
}

This allows controlling parallelism and application performance depending on the tasks and resources.