Channel push non blocking in GoLang

By default push operations to golang channel will block once the channel is full and wait that an other go routine will consume a message from the channel.

The following example will block after 3 messages queued in the channel, and since no other go routine is running it will crash with a dead lock error:

package main import "fmt" func main() { ch := make(chan string, 3) for i := 0; i < 10; i++ { ch <- "hello" fmt.Println("Pushed a message to the channel") } } 

To avoid blocking the execution of your application you can handle the case of a full channel by using select:

package main import "fmt" func main() { ch := make(chan string, 3) for i := 0; i < 10; i++ { select { case ch <- "hello": fmt.Println("Pushed a message to the channel") default: fmt.Println("WARN: The channel is full") } } } 

This way you can easily decide to ignore the message or handle this problem an other way than blocking the current go routine.