How to Sleep in Golang
Pausing the execution of a program is a common task in programming. Be it to wait for a network connection to complete or to wait for a user to press a key, among many other things. Golang is no exception to these tasks. In this article, we will learn how to sleep in Golang.
Sleeping in Golang
To sleep in Golang, the time.Sleep() function is used. This function takes a time duration as an argument and will pause the execution of the current thread for the specified duration.
Importing the time Package
To use the time.Sleep() function, the time package must be imported.
...
import "time"
...
using time.Sleep()
The time.Sleep() function takes a time duration as an argument. The time duration can be specified in seconds, milliseconds, microseconds, or nanoseconds. The time duration is specified using the time.Duration type. The time.Duration type is an alias for the int64 type. The time.Duration type is used to represent a time duration in nanoseconds.
...
time.Sleep(1 * time.Second)
...
Here we are pausing the execution of the current thread for 1 second. The time.Second constant is a time.Duration type that represents 1 second in nanoseconds. The time.Second constant is defined as 1e9 nanoseconds.
Example
package main
import (
"fmt"
"time"
)
func main(){
fmt.Println("Sleeping for 1 second...")
time.Sleep(1 * time.Second)
fmt.Println("Done sleeping.")
}
Sleep in a Loop
package main
import (
"fmt"
"time"
)
func main(){
for i := 0; i < 5; i++ {
fmt.Println("Sleeping for 1 second...")
time.Sleep(1 * time.Second)
}
fmt.Println("Done sleeping.")
}
Sleep for Goroutines
Pausing a goroutine is a common task given that goroutines are used to run concurrent tasks, it is often necessary to pause one goroutine while the others run. To pause a goroutine, the time.Sleep() function is also used.
package main
import (
"fmt"
"time"
)
func main(){
go func(){
fmt.Println("Sleeping for 5 seconds...")
time.Sleep(5 * time.Second)
fmt.Println("Done sleeping.")
}()
fmt.Println("Waiting for goroutine to finish...")
time.Sleep(10 * time.Second)
fmt.Println("Done waiting.")
}
Waiting for goroutine to finish...
Sleeping for 5 seconds...
Done sleeping.
Done waiting.
Conclusion
In this article, we learned how to sleep in Golang. We demonstrated how to sleep using the time package and the time.Sleep() function. We also learned how to sleep in a loop and how to sleep for goroutines.
