The context Package
Explore how the Go context package supports cancellation and deadline management in concurrent programs. This lesson explains Context interface methods and shows how to use WithCancel, WithTimeout, and WithDeadline to manage goroutine lifecycles effectively.
We'll cover the following...
Purpose of the context package
The main purpose of the context package is to define the Context type and support cancellation. Yes, you heard that right; there are times when, for some reason, we want to abandon what we are doing. However, it would be very helpful to be able to include some extra information about our cancellation decisions. The context package allows us to do exactly that.
If we take a look at the source code of the context package, we will realize that its implementation is pretty simple—even the implementation of the Context type is pretty simple, yet the context package is very important.
The Context type is an interface with four methods named Deadline(), Done(), Err(), and Value(). The good news is that we do not need to implement all of these functions of the Context interface—we just ...