The Go Programming Language
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
What happens with closures running as goroutines?
Some confusion may arise when using closures with concurrency.
Consider the following program:
func main() {
done := make(chan bool)
values := []string{"a", "b", "c"}
for _, v := range values {
go func() {
fmt.Println(v)
done <- true
}()
}
// wait for all goroutines to complete before exiting
for _ = range values {
<-done
}
}
One might mistakenly expect to see a, b, c as the output. What you'll
probably see instead is c, c, c. This is because each iteration of the
loop uses the same instance of the variable v, so each closure shares
that single variable. When the closure runs, it prints the value of v
at the time fmt.Println is executed, but v may have been modified
since the goroutine was launched. To help detect this and other
problems before they happen, run go vet.
To bind the current value of v to each closure as it is launched, one
must modify the inner loop to create a new variable each iteration.
One way is to pass the variable as an argument to the closure:
for _, v := range values {
go func(u string) {
fmt.Println(u)
done <- true
}(v)
}
In this example, the value of v is passed as an argument to the
anonymous function. That value is then accessible inside the function
as the variable u.
Even easier is just to create a new variable, using a declaration
style that may seem odd but works fine in Go:
for _, v := range values {
v := v // create a new 'v'.
go func() {
fmt.Println(v)
done <- true
}()
}
Therefore, in your case, create a new variable by adding the statement j := j,
for j := 0; j < MAX_TH; j++ {
j := j
go func() { getWebPageContent("http://www.example.com", messages, j) }()
}
For example,
package main
import (
"fmt"
"io/ioutil"
"net/http"
)
func getWebPageContent(url string, c chan int, val int) interface{} {
if r, err := http.Get(url); err == nil {
defer r.Body.Close()
if body, err := ioutil.ReadAll(r.Body); err == nil {
c <- val
return string(body)
}
} else {
fmt.Println(err)
}
return "XoX"
}
const MAX_TH = 40
func main() {
// pln := fmt.Println
messages := make(chan int)
for j := 0; j < MAX_TH; j++ {
j := j
go func() { getWebPageContent("http://www.example.com", messages, j) }()
}
routine_count := 0
var page_number int
for {
page_number = <-messages
routine_count++
fmt.Println("Page number: ", page_number)
if routine_count == MAX_TH {
break
}
}
close(messages)
}
Output:
Page number: 23
Page number: 6
Page number: 1
Page number: 3
Page number: 28
Page number: 32
Page number: 18
Page number: 22
Page number: 0
Page number: 36
Page number: 7
Page number: 21
Page number: 12
Page number: 2
Page number: 5
Page number: 4
Page number: 33
Page number: 13
Page number: 20
Page number: 27
Page number: 29
Page number: 8
Page number: 31
Page number: 10
Page number: 17
Page number: 25
Page number: 19
Page number: 35
Page number: 14
Page number: 38
Page number: 15
Page number: 30
Page number: 37
Page number: 39
Page number: 26
Page number: 9
Page number: 16
Page number: 11
Page number: 24
Page number: 34
