Handling goroutines with channels

Table of contents

Introducing Channels

A channel is essentially a pipe where you can send or receive values from. Channels are the main way to communicate different goroutines to avoid race conditions on shared memory.

Channels can only send or receive a single value type and must be specified when the channel is created.

There are two kinds of channels:

• Unbuffered Channels: Only accept sending values to it if there’s somebody awaiting to recieve it.

  unbuffered := make(chan string)

• Buffered Channels: A Buffered channel allows sending up to n values, being n the channel capacity (buffer size). When the buffer is full, sending data will be a blocking call until some other goroutine reads a value from the channel. In the same fashion, reading a value will be a blocking call if there’s no value in the buffer.

  buffered := make(chan string, n)

Go uses an inverse arrow <- to read and write to a buffer as follows.

buffer := make(chan string, 1)
buffer <- "hello" // Send a value
value := <- buffer // Read a value

When passing around channels, you can also determine how the channel is expected to be used.

• Read only: <-chan T
• Write only: chan<- T
• Read-Write: chan T

A Practical Example

Let’s illustrate a practical example of a simple list permutation. Let’s imagine a situation where we want to calculate the double of each integer in a list. Althought it’s a simple case, it’s a process that can be be done concurrently in different goroutines. To do this, we’ll first create the handler that will perform this operation and then send the result to the buffered channel.

func double(res chan<- int, num int) {
	res <- num * 2
}

We can then create a list and a buffered channel, since we know how many items we’ll have.

nums := []int{1, 2, 3, 4, 5}
res := make(chan int, len(nums))

We can then iterate over the original array to dispatch a new goroutine to calculate the double of each number concurrently. The catch is that that since this happens cuncurrently there’s no guarantee that the order of completion is the same as the one we dispatch the goroutines. To complete this simple example, let’s see how we would dispatch those goroutines first:

for _, num := range nums {
    go double(res, num)
}

And now we need to read the results from the buffer (cap() returns the capacity of a buffered channel). We can also close the channel afterwards since it’s no longer needed.

doubled := []int{}
for i := 0; i < cap(res); i++ {
    doubled = append(doubled, <-res)
}
close(res)

Understandably, the expected result is not guaranteed to be ordered. To do this we’ll need more context passed around in the buffer as shown in the next example.

package main

import "fmt"

func double(res chan<- int, num int) {
	res <- num * 2
}

func main() {
	nums := []int{1, 2, 3, 4, 5}
	res := make(chan int, len(nums))

	for _, num := range nums {
		go double(res, num)
	}

	doubled := []int{}
	for i := 0; i < cap(res); i++ {
		doubled = append(doubled, <-res)
	}
	close(res)

	fmt.Println(doubled)
}

Sending more information on channels

After checking out the previous example, it’s clear that sometimes a primitive value isn’t enough. Sometimes we need more context to know where to place that value. Taking the example above, let’s say we were interested in placing the results in the same list index as their original ones. That will require is to know what index the original value comes from when we read the channel’s value.

To do this, we’ll first create a Result type, that we’ll use to read and write to a channel.

type Result struct {
    Value int
    Index int
}

Afterwards, when creating the channel, we’ll use that type instead of a primitive int.

res := make(chan Result, 5)

Now, we need to tell our handler more information about the number. Looking at our result it’s clear we’ll need to know the index where the original int is located.

func double(res chan<- Result, num int, i int) {
	res <- Result{Value: num * 2, Index: i}
}

Because of that, when we iterate and dispatch those goroutines, we’ll need to supply the index to them, modifying the for loop to be the following.

for i, num := range nums {
    go double(res, num, i)
}

Having done that, the only thing left to do is to read the results from the channel and add them to the right position. We we’ll first modify our doubled list to be created with the exact number of elements we have. We’ll then proceed to read from the channel and assign the value it’s right index on that list.

doubled := make([]int, len(nums))
for i := 0; i < cap(res); i++ {
    result := <-res
    doubled[result.Index] = result.Value
}
close(res)

And with this, the result will always be ordered!

package main

import "fmt"

type Result struct {
	Value int
	Index int
}

func double(res chan<- Result, num int, i int) {
	res <- Result{Value: num * 2, Index: i}
}

func main() {
	nums := []int{1, 2, 3, 4, 5}
	res := make(chan Result, len(nums))

	for i, num := range nums {
		go double(res, num, i)
	}

	doubled := make([]int, len(nums))
	for i := 0; i < cap(res); i++ {
		result := <-res
		doubled[result.Index] = result.Value
	}
	close(res)

	fmt.Println(doubled)
}

Èrik C. Forés Senior Software Engineer at Submer