When to use a buffered channel?

Question

What are the uses cases for buffered channels ? If i want multiple parallel actions i could just use the default, synchronous channel eq.

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Answer 1

Generally, buffering in channels is beneficial for performance reasons.

If a program is designed using an event-flow or data-flow approach, channels provide the means for the events to pass between one process and another (I use the term process in the same sense as in Tony Hoare's Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP), ie. effectively synonymous with the goroutine).

• There are times when a program needs its components to remain in lock-step synchrony. In this case, unbuffered channels are required.

• Otherwise, it is typically beneficial to add buffering to the channels. This should be seen as an optimisation step (deadlock may still be possible if not designed out).

• There are novel throttle structures made possible by using channels with small buffers (example).

• There are special overwriting or lossy forms of channels used in occam and jcsp for fixing the special case of a cycle (or loop) of processes that would otherwise probably deadlock. This is also possible in Go by writing an overwriting goroutine buffer (example).

You should never add buffering merely to fix a deadlock. If your program deadlocks, it's far easier to fix by starting with zero buffering and think through the dependencies. Then add buffering when you know it won't deadlock.

You can construct goroutines compositionally - that is, a goroutine may itself contain goroutines. This is a feature of CSP and benefits scalability greatly. The internal channels between a group of goroutines are not of interest when designing the external use of the group as a self-contained component. This principle can be applied repeatedly at increasingly-larger scales.