Go Systems Programming

The select keyword

A select statement in Go is like a switch statement for channels and allows a goroutine to wait on multiple communication operations. Therefore, the main advantage you get from using the select keyword is that the same function can deal with multiple channels using a single select statement! Additionally, you can have nonblocking operations on channels.

The name of the program that will be used for illustrating the select keyword will be useSelect.go and will be presented in five parts. The useSelect.go program allows you to generate the number of random you want, which is defined in the first command-line argument, up to a certain limit, which is the second command-line argument.

The first part of useSelect.go is the following: ...