Timers

Use time.Timer to schedule some work to be done in the future. When the timer expires, you will receive a signal from a channel. You can use a timer to run a function later or to cancel a process that ran too long.

How to do it...

You can create a timer in one of two ways:

• Use time.NewTimer or time.After. The timer will send a signal through a channel when it expires. Use a select statement, or read from the channel to receive the timer expiration signal.
• Use time.AfterFunc to call a function when the timer expires.

How it works...

A time.Timer timer is created with time.Duration:

// Create a 10-second timer
timer := time.NewTimer(time.Second*10)

The timer contains a channel that will receive the current timestamp after 10 seconds pass. A timer is created with a channel capacity of 1, so the timer runtime will always be able to write to that channel and stop the timer. In other words, if you fail to read from a timer, it will not leak; it will...