Is it safe to hide sending to channel behind function call

Question

I have a struct called Hub with a Run() method which is executed in its own goroutine. This method sequentially handles incoming messages. Messages arrive concurrently from multiple producers (separate goroutines). Of course I use a channel to accomplish this task. But now I want to hide the Hub behind an interface to be able to choose from its implementations. So, using a channel as a simple Hub's field isn't appropriate.

package main
import "fmt"
import "time"

type Hub struct {
    msgs chan string
}
func (h *Hub) Run() {
    for {
        msg, hasMore := <- h.msgs
        if !hasMore {
            return
        }
        fmt.Println("hub: msg received", msg)
    }
}
func (h *Hub) SendMsg(msg string) {
    h.msgs <- msg
}

func send(h *Hub, prefix string) {
    for i := 0; i < 5; i++ {
        fmt.Println("main: sending msg")
        h.SendMsg(fmt.Sprintf("%s %d", prefix, i))
    }
}

func main() {
    h := &Hub{make(chan string)}
    go h.Run()
    for i := 0; i < 10; i++ {
        go send(h, fmt.Sprintf("msg sender #%d", i))
    }
    time.Sleep(time.Second)
}

So I've introduced Hub.SendMsg(msg string) function that just calls h.msgs <- msg and which I can add to the HubInterface. And as a Go-newbie I wonder, is it safe from the concurrency perspective? And if so - is it a common approach in Go?

Playground here.

Answer 1

Channel send semantics do not change when you move the send into a method. Andrew's answer points out that the channel needs to be created with make to send successfully, but that was always true, whether or not the send is inside a method.

If you are concerned about making sure callers can't accidentally wind up with invalid Hub instances with a nil channel, one approach is to make the struct type private (hub) and have a NewHub() function that returns a fully initialized hub wrapped in your interface type. Since the struct is private, code in other packages can't try to initialize it with an incomplete struct literal (or any struct literal).

That said, it's often possible to create invalid or nonsense values in Go and that's accepted: net.IP("HELLO THERE BOB") is valid syntax, or net.IP{}. So if you think it's better to expose your Hub type go ahead.