Panic while trying to stop creating more goroutines

Question

I'm trying to parallelize calls to an API to speed things up, but I'm facing a problem where I need to stop spinning up goroutines to call the API if I receive an error from one of the goroutine calls. Since I am closing the channel twice(once in the error handling part and when the execution is done), I'm getting a panic: close of closed channel error. Is there an elegant way to handle this without the program to panic? Any help would be appreciated!

The following is the pseudo-code snippet.

for i := 0; i < someNumber; i++ {
    go func(num int, q chan<- bool) {
        value, err := callAnAPI()
        if err != nil {
            close(q)//exit from the for-loop
        }
        // process the value here
        wg.Done()
    }(i, quit)
}
close(quit)

To mock my scenario, I have written the following program. Is there any way to exit the for-loop gracefully once the condition(commented out) is satisfied?

package main

import (
    "fmt"
    "sync"
)

func receive(q <-chan bool) {
    for {
        select {
        case <-q:
            return
        }
    }
}

func main() {
    quit := make(chan bool)

    var result []int
    wg := &sync.WaitGroup{}
    wg.Add(10)
    for i := 0; i < 10; i++ {
        go func(num int, q chan<- bool) {
            //if num == 5 {
            //  close(q)
            //}
            result = append(result, num)

            wg.Done()
        }(i, quit)
    }
    close(quit)
    receive(quit)

    wg.Wait()

    fmt.Printf("Result: %v", result)
}

Answer 1

You can use context package which defines the Context type, which carries deadlines, cancellation signals, and other request-scoped values across API boundaries and between processes.

package main

import (
    "context"
    "fmt"
    "sync"
)

func main() {
    ctx, cancel := context.WithCancel(context.Background())
    defer cancel() // cancel when we are finished, even without error

    wg := &sync.WaitGroup{}

    for i := 0; i < 10; i++ {
        wg.Add(1)
        go func(num int) {
            defer wg.Done()
            select {
            case <-ctx.Done():
                return // Error occured somewhere, terminate
            default: // avoid blocking
            }

            // your code here
            // res, err := callAnAPI()
            // if err != nil {
            //  cancel()
            //  return
            //}

            if num == 5 {
                cancel()
                return
            }

            fmt.Println(num)

        }(i)
    }

    wg.Wait()

    fmt.Println(ctx.Err())
}

Try on: Go Playground

You can also take a look to this answer for more detailed explanation.