Goroutines are, for all practical purposes, threads. They're cheaper than real threads but they still have all the subtle complexity that comes with shared-memory preemptive threading (everything shared needs to be appropriately locked, scheduling is non-deterministic and can happen any time, etc). Async/await is different; context switches can only happen at an `await` expression. This greatly reduces the number of possibilities that must be considered and simplifies the task of concurrent programming (for more, see https://glyph.twistedmatrix.com/2014/02/unyielding.html).
In Python, the closest equivalent to `go foo()` is `threading.Thread(target=foo).start()`. Or you can use gevent to get goroutine-like lightweight threads, but I find this is works better in go than in python because the entire language is designed around it. In python it's common to find libraries that are not compatible with gevent's monkey-patching and so you lose concurrency in a way that is difficult to detect or guard against.
Going to have to disagree with the criticism of gevent. The monkey-patching is very robust, despite the fact that monkey-patching is a sin in general. I've never had any problems with it, with the exception of third party native modules.
If code is using the regular Python socket and threading libraries, it will almost always work seamlessly. Gevent provides the closest thing to goroutines.
Third party native modules are exactly the issue. Many database drivers (etc) are wrappers around native libraries that do not integrate with gevent; the ease of integration with native code is generally one of Python's great strengths. To use gevent you must pay a lot more attention to implementation details of libraries you rely on.
In Python, the closest equivalent to `go foo()` is `threading.Thread(target=foo).start()`. Or you can use gevent to get goroutine-like lightweight threads, but I find this is works better in go than in python because the entire language is designed around it. In python it's common to find libraries that are not compatible with gevent's monkey-patching and so you lose concurrency in a way that is difficult to detect or guard against.