Is there a way to do repetitive tasks at intervals?

Question

Is there a way to do repetitive background tasks in Go? I'm thinking of something like Timer.schedule(task, delay, period) in Java. I know I can do this with a goroutine and Time.sleep(), but I'd like something that easily stopped.

Here's what I got, but looks ugly to me. Is there a cleaner/better way?

func oneWay() {
    var f func()
    var t *time.Timer

    f = func () {
        fmt.Println("doing stuff")
        t = time.AfterFunc(time.Duration(5) * time.Second, f)
    }

    t = time.AfterFunc(time.Duration(5) * time.Second, f)

    defer t.Stop()

    //simulate doing stuff
    time.Sleep(time.Minute)
}

Answer 1

The function time.NewTicker makes a channel that sends a periodic message, and provides a way to stop it. Use it something like this (untested):

ticker := time.NewTicker(5 * time.Second)
quit := make(chan struct{})
go func() {
    for {
       select {
        case <- ticker.C:
            // do stuff
        case <- quit:
            ticker.Stop()
            return
        }
    }
 }()

You can stop the worker by closing the quit channel: close(quit).