Quick demo of Go’s context.WithTimeout

Aaron — Sat, 29 Apr 2017 01:14:45 +0000

To better understand Go’s context withTimeout functionality (and as a reference for myself), I’ve created this small self-contained demo. I didn’t find the published documentation’s example to be clear enough. The interesting part, coming from other programming languages and platforms, was that the WithTimeout function only was a signal that something happened. It doesn’t do anything when there’s a time out (like abort a goroutine or anything dramatic like that).

The essential pieces:

Call WithTimeout passing the Background() context and specify the timeout (I’ve specified 3.2 seconds)
Be a good citizen and defer the cancellation (to be sure that it’s called) and defer close the channel
Start the go routine which waits for the Done channel
When the Done is signaled, display the current time in seconds and what caused the signal
The main app is waiting for the goroutine to end, so signal that.
In the main function, the code sleeps and wakes emitting some time stamps to the console
Depending on whether cancel is called, the goroutine signal may be one of two things.
1. If cancel is not called prior to the second sleep in the code, the ctx.Err() returns
```
<-ctx.Done():  context deadline exceeded
```
2. If cancel however is called, the ctx.Err() returns:
```
<-ctx.Done():  context canceled
```
Then, the goroutine uses the channel to signal completion (wait<-true).

View the code on Gist.

You can experiment with this sample here.

With cancel called (the line cancel() not commented out):

first sleep completed,  02.00
Timeout: 02.00
in <-ctx.Done():  context canceled
after second sleep done,  04.00

And, with // cancel() commented out:

first sleep completed,  02.00
Timeout: 03.20
in <-ctx.Done():  context deadline exceeded
after second sleep done,  04.00

Hopefully this helps someone besides me.

Tree walking and display console app in Go

Aaron — Fri, 18 Nov 2016 13:44:10 +0000

I hadn’t done anything at all interesting in Go. And some might say, I still haven’t. However, I wanted to do something that I’d find occasionally useful.

On Linux, this is already available, but the the Windows version is lacking. I wanted a tiny console app that would display a tree of the directory and file structure.

So, that’s what I built.

It’s one small file with one external library dependency.

I did notice that the Go packages for directory scanning like ReadDir suffer from a common issue when using the traditional Win32 APIs: they do not adequately handle file paths longer than about 250 characters. When you have NodeJS source code on your system with lots of deeply nested paths, many Windows programs fail miserably when doing file/folder management operations (Windows Explorer, I’m looking at YOU). Using the one “easy” trick of prepending the path with \\?\, you can use the APIs like ReadDir reasonably reliably. Whereas in earlier versions of my tree app it would crash, it now can handle deeply nested directory structures.

go get github.com/fatih/color

View the code on Gist.

GoLang – WiredPrairie

Quick demo of Go’s context.WithTimeout

Tree walking and display console app in Go