You absolutely can use goroutines without waitgroups! It all depends on what you are doing with them. Where waitgroups come in is when you need to something only after *all* of the goroutines on a specific task are done.
Chances are that if you are not using waitgroups, you are either using channels or you are only interested in the side-effects of the goroutines and are running a long-running service that does not need to have a clear end-point. For example, there is a spot in one of my code-bases where I fire off a few optimization routines in parallel - each one takes a channel to feed a result in, and I know going in exactly how many results there will be. I am going to be comparing and keepign the best, so I don't care which routine returns its result first, last, etc - I simply pull the known number of results out of the channel - knowing that it will block until that number of goroutines has returned. This is a known number of routines though, and a waitgroup would be a viable alternative here. I also have two other kinds of programs that don't use waitgroups - one sort of them builds a chain of channels with a goroutine pushing data through, and all the other goroutines just flow data through the channel using range until the channel closes, then they evaporate. Doesn't need a waitgroup because they aren't working on 'pieces of the data that have to be put back together at the end' but instead are each operating on *all* the data as it flows through them. And the others fire off a goroutine in response to an incoming connection, handle that connection, and then go away. No need for waitgroups there, unless they in turn fire off a collective operation. A waitgroup is just a way of saying, "I need to be able to wait until all these goroutines have done there stuff and finished." If you don't need to wait for a group of them to finish, you don't need a waitgroup. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "golang-nuts" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to golang-nuts+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
