This was an interesting use of channels in Go from today. The goal was to listen on a channel for a stream of values as they arrived one-by-one. We then had to process and batch them up in order to get them into a certain format, and then send them on another channel.

The following code shows a simpler example: listening for a stream of ints and batching them into slices. A batch is sent after 15 elements are gathered or 100 ms after the last send.

See it in action at the Go Playground!

Thanks to John Berryman (@JnBrymn) for providing a sanity check and the original skeleton program.

package main

import (
	"fmt"
	"math/rand"
	"time"
)

func main() {
	from := make(chan int)
	to := make(chan []int)

	go func() {
		for i := 0; i < 500; i++ {
			from <- i
			// vary the time between sends
			time.Sleep(time.Duration(rand.Intn(15)) * time.Millisecond)
		}
	}()

	go func() {
		for {
			fmt.Println(<-to)
		}
	}()

	var wait = time.After(time.Millisecond * 100)
	var buffer = make([]int, 0)

	for {
		select {
		case <-wait:
			if len(buffer) > 0 {
				to <- buffer
				buffer = make([]int, 0)
			}
			wait = time.After(time.Millisecond * 100)
		case i := <-from:
			buffer = append(buffer, i)
			if len(buffer) == 15 {
				to <- buffer
				buffer = buffer[:0]
				wait = time.After(time.Millisecond * 100)
			}
		}
	}
}