Go 1.16: signal.NotifyContext

Yesterday I somehow stumbled (probably via r/golang) onto another nice feature that’s incoming with Go 1.16 which I had previously missed while skimming through the release notes: signal.NotifyContext.

Whenever you have some kind of long-running process there might be a need to do some state-clean-up, closing connections, or just doing some general house-keeping before exiting. Such processes usually exit when they receive, for instance, an interrupt from the operating system (e.g. someone hitting Ctrl+C in the shell the process is running in).

Previously, you had to basically setup up a signal handler including channel and separate Go routine yourself if you wanted to just cancel some context, but now there is a standard library function for that:

package main

import (
	"context"
	"fmt"
	"os"
	"os/signal"
)

func main() {
	ctx, done := signal.NotifyContext(context.Background(), os.Interrupt)
	defer done()

	fmt.Println("Waiting for SIGINT.")
	<-ctx.Done()
	fmt.Println("We are done here.")
}

One more thing to look forward to with 1.16 ☺️