WaitGroups

WaitGroup are used to wait for multiple threads to complete.

The sync.new_waitgroup() function is used to create a WaitGroup instance.

Let us look at an example of using WaitGroup:

import time import sync fn worker(id int) { println('Worker ${id} starting') time.sleep(time.second) println('Worker ${id} done') } fn main() { mut wg := sync.new_waitgroup() for i in 0 .. 5 { wg.add(1) spawn fn [mut wg, i] () { defer { wg.done() } worker(i) }() } wg.wait() }

Here we start 5 threads, each of which makes some kind of payload in the form of a call to the worker() function.

We call wg.wait() to wait for all threads to finish. This call will block the current thread until all threads have completed. This will happen when wg.done() is called for every call to wg.add(1).

In the example above, we call wg.add(1) 5 times in a loop, which means we are waiting for 5 threads to complete.

When the worker() function ends, we call wg.done() to tell WaitGroup that the thread has ended.

If we call wg.done() more times than wg.add(1), then the program will panic.

If we call wg.done() fewer times than wg.add(1), then the program will hang forever.