Using Go Routines and Channels in Your Program

In this article, we will explore how to use go routines and channels in your program. With go routines, you can fetch multiple URLs at the same time, while channels help you communicate and share data between different running go routines.

Integrating Go Routines into Your Program

Before we can start using go routines, we need to integrate them into our program. Whenever we call our check link function, we want to spawn a brand new go routine using the 'go' keyword. We need to create the child routines that fetch the given link, while the main routine controls the program's exiting process.

To implement this, we place the 'go' keyword in front of our function calls. We only use the 'go' keyword in front of function calls to create a brand new go routine. Once the go routine is created, it will fetch the given link while the routine waits until it is completed.

Creating a Channel to Share Data between Go Routines

To make sure that the main routine is aware of when each of the child go routines completes their code, we can use channels. Channels facilitate communication between different running go routines. The main routine controls the program's exiting process using a channel. Once we create a channel, we can share data between any go routine that has access to that channel.

It is essential to understand that channels are typed just like every other variable. The information that we pass into channels or the data we share between go routines has to be of the same type. Once we specify the type of a channel, it can only send messages of that type to other go routines. For example, If we create a channel that is meant for sharing strings, we can only send strings through this channel to other go routines.

We can treat channels just like any other value in Go. Channels have different types, such as strings, floats, booleans, or structs. However, we cannot take a channel that's made with a string and pass a float value into it because it will result in a type error.

To use channels to communicate between different go routines, we create a channel of type string. Once created, any go routine can push a message to the channel indicating that its work is complete. The main routine waits for each message to indicate that each child routine has finished, ready for the program to exit.

Conclusion

Go routines and channels are powerful tools for concurrent programing in Go. Integrating go routines into a program not only saves time but also reduces the chances of blocks occurring. With the proper use of channels, data sharing, and communication between go routines become very efficient. In conclusion, understanding how to use go routines and channels will significantly improve the efficiency of your Golang programs.