Question

I have a goroutine that calls a method, and passes returned value on a channel:

ch := make(chan int, 100)
go func(){
    for {
        ch <- do_stuff()
    }
}()

How do I stop such a goroutine?

Answer 1

EDIT: I wrote this answer up in haste, before realizing that your question is about sending values to a chan inside a goroutine. The approach below can be used either with an additional chan as suggested above, or using the fact that the chan you have already is bi-directional, you can use just the one…

If your goroutine exists solely to process the items coming out of the chan, you can make use of the “close” builtin and the special receive form for channels.

That is, once you’re done sending items on the chan, you close it. Then inside your goroutine you get an extra parameter to the receive operator that shows whether the channel has been closed.

Here is a complete example (the waitgroup is used to make sure that the process continues until the goroutine completes):

package main

import "sync"
func main() {
    var wg sync.WaitGroup
    wg.Add(1)

    ch := make(chan int)
    go func() {
        for {
            foo, ok := <- ch
            if !ok {
                println("done")
                wg.Done()
                return
            }
            println(foo)
        }
    }()
    ch <- 1
    ch <- 2
    ch <- 3
    close(ch)

    wg.Wait()
}