Do you know about tickers? They’re used when you want to do something repeatedly at regular intervals. They shouldn’t be confused with timers, that are used when you want to do something in the future.
Here is how a ticker is used. In this example, the ticker will tick every 500ms and the program will exit after 1600ms, after 3 ticks.
package main
import "time"
import "fmt"
func main() {
ticker := time.NewTicker(500 * time.Millisecond)
go func() {
for t := range ticker.C {
fmt.Println("Tick at", t)
}
}()
time.Sleep(1600 * time.Millisecond)
ticker.Stop()
fmt.Println("Ticker stopped")
}
You can run the code in the Go Playground.
But what if you wanted your first tick to happen instantly, when your program starts? This can come in handy if your ticker ticks less often, say every hour, and you don’t want to wait that much time.
In that case, if the logic you need to run at a specific interval is in a function, you can call your function outside of the ticker statement or you can adopt this kind of construction.
package main
import "time"
import "fmt"
func main() {
ticker := time.NewTicker(1 * time.Second)
fmt.Println("Started at", time.Now())
defer ticker.Stop()
go func() {
for ; true; < -ticker.C {
fmt.Println("Tick at", time.Now())
}
}()
time.Sleep(10 * time.Second)
fmt.Println("Stopped at", time.Now())
}
You can run the code in the Go Playground. Here is a sample output:
Started at 2009-11-10 23:00:00 +0000 UTC m=+0.000000001 Tick at 2009-11-10 23:00:00 +0000 UTC m=+0.000000001 Tick at 2009-11-10 23:00:01 +0000 UTC m=+1.000000001 Tick at 2009-11-10 23:00:02 +0000 UTC m=+2.000000001 Tick at 2009-11-10 23:00:03 +0000 UTC m=+3.000000001 Tick at 2009-11-10 23:00:04 +0000 UTC m=+4.000000001 Tick at 2009-11-10 23:00:05 +0000 UTC m=+5.000000001 Tick at 2009-11-10 23:00:06 +0000 UTC m=+6.000000001 Tick at 2009-11-10 23:00:07 +0000 UTC m=+7.000000001 Tick at 2009-11-10 23:00:08 +0000 UTC m=+8.000000001 Tick at 2009-11-10 23:00:09 +0000 UTC m=+9.000000001 Stopped at 2009-11-10 23:00:10 +0000 UTC m=+10.000000001