Earlier quoted context omitted.
when I was learning Go, I read a guide that told you to fire off a goroutine to walk a tree and send the values back to the main goroutine via a channel. I think about that "just an example" guide a lot when I see bad channel code. For me the biggest red flag is somebody using a channel as part of an exported library function signature, either as a param or a return value. Almost never the right call.
> when I was learning Go, I read a guide that told you to fire off a goroutine to walk a tree and send the values back to the main goroutine via a channel. Okay, I gotta ask - what exactly is wrong with this approach? Unless you're starting only a single goroutine[1], this seems to me like a reasonable approach. Think about recursively finding all files in a directory that match a particular filter, and then performi…
The caller would do:
for f := range asyncDirIter(dir) {
}
But my first question would be: is it really necessary? Are you really scanning such large directories to make async dir traversal beneficial?
I actually did that once but that that was for a program that scanned the whole drive. I wouldn't do it for scanning a local drive with 100 files.
Finally, you re-defined "traversing a tree" into "traversing a filesystem".
I assume that the post you're responding to was talking about traversing a tree structure in memory. In that context using goroutines is an overkill. Harder to implement, harder to use and slower.