Nil Channels Always Block

In this post, we will discuss a useful idiom in Go that makes use of the fact that receiving and sending on nil channels will always block:

// Create an uninitialized (nil) channel.
var ch chan struct{}

// Receiving on a nil channel blocks forever.
<-ch

// Sending on a nil channel will also block forever.
ch <- struct{}{}

This might not seem very useful at first, and may have even introduced bugs in your programs in the past (for example, if you forget to initialize your channels with make before you use them). However, this property can be leveraged in a couple of clever ways, especially when you need to dynamically disable a case in a select statement:

if disableSelectCase {
	ch1 = nil
} else {
	ch1 = nonNilChan
}

select {
case <-ch1:
	// This case will only be considered if ch1 is not nil.
case <-ch2:
	// This case will always be considered (assuming ch2 is non-nil).
}

The code example above illustrates the fact that when a nil channel is a case in a select statement, it is effectively ignored. If the disableSelectCase boolean condition is true, we prevent ch1 channel from being considered as part of the select statement by setting it to nil.

This property can also be used to avoid spin loops—for example, if you need to wait on multiple channels to close:

// WARNING! Spin loop might occur!
var isClosed1, isClosed2 bool
for !isClosed1 || !isClosed2 {
	select {
	case _, ok := <-ch1:
		if !ok {
			isClosed1 = true
		}
	case _, ok := <-ch2:
		if !ok {
			isClosed2 = true
		}
	}
}

The code above will cause a very subtle bug in your program if one of the two channels is closed. Since a closed channel will never block, if ch1 is closed, ch1 will always be ready to receive on subsequent iterations through the loop. As a result, the program will enter an infinite spin loop, and case <-ch2: may or may not be given a chance to run later on.

To solve this problem, we can leverage the property that nil channels always block:

// Safely disable channels after they are closed.
for ch1 != nil || ch2 != nil {
	select {
	case _, ok := <-ch1:
		if !ok {
			ch1 = nil
		}
	case _, ok := <-ch2:
		if !ok {
			ch2 = nil
		}
	}
}

Special thanks to Dave Cheney for motivating the topic of this blog post!