What is a Channel?
Explore how channels in Go enable communication between concurrent goroutines by sending and receiving typed data safely. Understand channel declaration, sending and receiving values, the importance of synchronization between sender and receiver, and how to close channels properly to manage goroutine communication effectively.
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Overview
If the goroutines execute independently, the question arises: how do the goroutines communicate with each other? The answer is in Golang, we use bidirectional or unidirectional channels to communicate between goroutines.
A channel is a technique for communicating between concurrently running functions by sending and receiving data of a specific element type. It could be of any type, such as a channel of integers, strings, and so on. In other words, when we have numerous goroutines running simultaneously, channels are the most convenient way for them to communicate with one another. In simple words, the channels are the pipelines known to connect concurrent goroutines. Channels are nothing more than pointers. As a result, we can quickly pass them to goroutines and easily input or read data.
Channels are thread safe. Therefore, we can use channel variables to send and receive values concurrently via multiple goroutines.