How to Keep a Go Program's Main Goroutine Running Indefinitely?

Keeping a Go Project's Main Goroutine Running Indefinitely

Unlike main functions in other programming languages, Go's main goroutine exits upon returning from the function. This raises the question: how can we keep the main goroutine running indefinitely?

"Sleeping" the Goroutine

Several constructs can block the main goroutine without consuming CPU resources:

• Select statement without cases or default
• Receiving from an empty channel
• Receiving from a nil channel
• Sending to a nil channel
• Locking a locked sync.Mutex

Quitting the Goroutine

When it's desired to provide a way to quit, a channel can be employed:

1. Create a quit channel: quit := make(chan struct{})
2. In main(), block on the quit channel: <-quit
3. From another goroutine, send a signal to the quit channel when ready to quit: close(quit)

Sleeping Without Blocking

If we don't wish to block the main goroutine but just prevent it from ending, the following constructs can be used:

• Call time.Sleep() with a sufficiently large duration (approximately 292 years)
• Loop infinitely over the sleep: for { time.Sleep(...) }

Note:

Closing the quit channel can terminate the program at any time, even if other goroutines are running. This is because the main goroutine returns upon receiving from the closed channel, causing the program to exit before non-main goroutines complete.

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