Author of the blog here, curious what a better alternative would be in this context. The channel has to be passed around for the producer and consumer to interface with each other. Are there better patterns for this?
You also have to be very careful about managing the channel lifecycle. If you're not pulling (selecting from) the channel, the library will be permanently stuck. So you must now have a way to tell the library to stop sending, and it must cancel any in-flight send operations if you call producer.Stop() or whatever. In my experience libraries often have bugs in their channel code. It's far too easy to get deadlocks with channels that have interdependencies, and you have to be very careful about buffered versus unbuffered channels, as they behave differently.
A better API, in my opinion, is to offer a callback or single-method interface. Then the implementer of that callback or interface can choose to use channels internally if they desire, or they can use something else. You get the same backpressure support since you can treat it as synchronous.
After all, a channel's send interface is essentially just:
type Channel[T any] interface {
Send(T)
}
My rule of thumb for channels is that they're goroutine glue, not an API primitive. Build APIs out of interfaces, not channels. The only thing that uses channels should be the one that's controlling the goroutines, because it's the thing that orchestrates them.
That said, it's not a hard rule. There are places where channels may have their place in a public API, though I'm not sure I can think of any examples off-hand.
you can always wrap channels to make them worse and less capable, but your API should expose the more capable option.
As you say being able to select is really nice too.
I found your excuse above is really nonsense. when your program is in Golang, you've already picked side, the concerned concurrency model has already been chosen by the user.
we are not talking about one of random concurrency models, we are talking about channel based sychnronization and communication in golang, if you don't want that and consider it as an issue, you shouldn't be using golang in the first place.
If I wanted to encapsulate iterating over a channel of Records, maybe it would be something like Go's io.Pipe function [2], which returns a PipeReader and PipeWriter? Except that it would work on Records rather than byte streams.
I don't have enough context to know if the extra encapsulation is a good idea in this case, though.
[1] https://github.com/search?q=repo%3APeerDB-io%2Fpeerdb%20GetR... [2] https://pkg.go.dev/io#Pipe