go_channels #

Go-style concurrency for Dart: typed channels, a faithful select over many channel operations, and structured task scopes with cooperative cancellation.

Dart's dart:async gives you futures and streams, but not the primitives Go and Kotlin developers reach for: a typed channel, a select that waits on several operations at once, or a scope where one task's failure cancels its siblings. go_channels adds those, in plain Dart, on a single isolate.

import 'package:go_channels/go_channels.dart';

final ch = Channel<int>(capacity: 1);
await ch.send(1);
print(await ch.receive()); // 1

Channels #

A Channel<T> passes values between asynchronous tasks. Unbuffered channels (the default) rendezvous: a send completes only when a receiver takes the value. Buffered channels hold up to capacity values before a send blocks.

The whole distinction is when send completes, which is what decides whether the sender feels backpressure the instant the receiver stalls:

final jobs = Channel<String>();              // unbuffered
final queue = Channel<String>(capacity: 32); // buffered

await for (final job in jobs.stream) {        // ranges until the channel closes
  handle(job);
}

Closing a channel lets receivers drain what is left, then observe closure. receiveOr mirrors Go's v, ok := <-ch:

final (value, ok) = await ch.receiveOr();
if (!ok) print('channel closed');

select #

select waits on several channel operations and runs exactly one, like Go's select. If more than one branch is ready, it picks one at random for fairness.

final label = await select<String>((s) {
  s.onReceive(jobs, (job, ok) => ok ? 'job: $job' : 'jobs closed');
  s.onSend(results, 42, () => 'sent a result');
  s.onTimeout(const Duration(seconds: 1), () => 'timed out');
});

Add onDefault to make the whole select non-blocking:

await select<void>((s) {
  s.onReceive(events, (e, ok) => handle(e));
  s.onDefault(() {}); // returns immediately if nothing is ready
});

Structured task scopes #

withTaskScope runs a group of tasks and returns only once all of them finish. If any task fails, the scope's token is cancelled so the siblings can stop, and the first error is rethrown. Nothing spawned inside outlives the scope.

final results = await withTaskScope((scope) async {
  final a = scope.spawn((_) => fetchA());
  final b = scope.spawn((_) => fetchB());
  return [await a, await b];
});

waitAll is the common case in one call:

final pages = await waitAll([
  (_) => fetch('/a'),
  (_) => fetch('/b'),
  (_) => fetch('/c'),
]);

Cancellation #

Dart futures cannot be forcibly killed, so cancellation is cooperative: a task observes its CancelToken and stops itself. Check isCancelled, call throwIfCancelled, or await whenCancelled inside a select.

await withTimeout(const Duration(seconds: 5), (token) async {
  while (!token.isCancelled) {
    await doOneChunk();
  }
});

A note on parallelism #

go_channels coordinates asynchronous tasks on one isolate. It does not add parallelism by itself: use it to structure concurrent work, and combine it with isolates when you need more than one core.

Choosing a capacity #

The obvious reason to buffer a channel is speed, and on one isolate that turns out not to be the reason. Pushing 200,000 values from one task to another, every buffered size lands within a few percent of every other, about 10% above the unbuffered rendezvous:

A waiting rendezvous does not block the isolate. With a send outstanding and no receiver in sight, a 1 ms periodic timer still fired 20 times in 20 ms, so there is no stalled thread for a buffer to buy back the way there would be with OS threads.

What capacity actually decides is when a producer feels backpressure: unbuffered, send waits for a receiver, so a slow consumer throttles the producer immediately; buffered, the producer runs ahead until the buffer fills. Pick it for that, not for throughput.

Draining through select is not a slow path either — measured on the same channel it came out slightly faster than a direct receive, so a worker that waits on work-or-shutdown pays nothing for the extra branch.

Numbers from benchmark/capacity_benchmark.dart on an Apple M-series core, stable across runs; benchmark/throughput_benchmark.dart measures the raw round-trip rate separately.

Dart is landing shared-memory multithreading (Isolate.runShared, tracked in dart-lang/sdk#56841). As that stabilizes, go_channels will offer a shared-memory execution path behind a capability check, so the same channel and select code can run across threads.

Status #

Version 0.1.0. The API is small and may change before 1.0. Issues and feedback are welcome.