I'll use a hacky inefficient prime number finder to make this question a little more concrete.
Let's say our main function fires off a bunch of "worker" goroutines. They will report their results to a single channnel which prints them. But not every worker will report something so we can't use a counter to know when the last job is finished. Or is there a way?
For the concrete example, here, main fires off goroutines to check whether the values 2...1000 are prime (yeah I know it is inefficient).
package main
import (
"fmt"
"time"
)
func main() {
c := make(chan int)
go func () {
for {
fmt.Print(" ", <- c)
}
}()
for n := 2; n < 1000; n++ {
go printIfPrime(n, c)
}
time.Sleep(2 * time.Second) // <---- THIS FEELS WRONG
}
func printIfPrime(n int, channel chan int) {
for d := 2; d * d <= n; d++ {
if n % d == 0 {
return
}
}
channel <- n
}
My problem is that I don't know how to reliably stop it at the right time. I tried adding a sleep at the end of main
and it works (but it might take too long, and this is no way to write concurrent code!). I would like to know if there was a way to send a stop signal through a channel or something so main
can stop at the right time.
The trick here is that I don't know how many worker responses there will be.
Is this impossible or is there a cool trick?
(If there's an answer for this prime example, great. I can probably generalize. Or maybe not. Maybe this is app specific?)