Golang range through channel with odd behaviour when inplementing Heap's permutation algorithm

Question

I was trying to implement Heap's Algorithm in go using channels. The code below is working fine when just printing the slices on the screen, but when using channels to delivery the arrays to a for/range loop on main function some unexpected behaviour occurs and the slices/arrays are printed in duplicity and not all permutations are sent. I thought that maybe i'm closing the channel earlier than the main function is able to print the results but i wouldn't expect that double print. Why is this happening and how can i make it work.

package main

import "fmt"

func perm(a []int64) {
    var n = len(a)
    var c = make([]int, n)
    fmt.Println(a)
    i := 0
    for i < n {
        if c[i] < i {
            if i%2 == 0 {
                a[0], a[i] = a[i], a[0]
            } else {
                a[c[i]], a[i] = a[i], a[c[i]]
            }
            fmt.Println(a)
            c[i]++
            i = 0
        } else {
            c[i] = 0
            i++
        }
    }
}

func permch(a []int64, ch chan<- []int64) {
    var n = len(a)
    var c = make([]int, n)
    ch <- a
    i := 0
    for i < n {
        if c[i] < i {
            if i%2 == 0 {
                a[0], a[i] = a[i], a[0]
            } else {
                a[c[i]], a[i] = a[i], a[c[i]]
            }
            ch <- a
            c[i]++
            i = 0
        } else {
            c[i] = 0
            i++
        }
    }
    close(ch)
}

func main() {
    var i = []int64{1, 2, 3}
    fmt.Println("Without Channels")
    perm(i)
    ch := make(chan []int64)
    go permch(i, ch)
    fmt.Println("With Channels")
    for slc := range ch {
        fmt.Println(slc)
    }

}

Answer 1

It looks like permch is modifying a at the same time as main is printing it, so your output is garbled.

I can think of three easy fixes:

1. Guard access to a with a mutex.
2. Put a copy of a on the channel:
3. Have some kind of return signal from main that it has printed and permch can continue. (don't really recommend this, but it works).

Number 2 is pretty simple:

a2 := make([]int64, len(a))
copy(a2,a)
ch <- a2

and is what I would recommend.

For #1, just declare a var m sync.Mutex as a package variable and Lock is anytime you read or modify a. This is a race condition though between the reader and the next modification, as you pointed out, so it probably isn't a good solution after all.

fixed version on playground using #3