how to listen to N channels? (dynamic select statement)

Question

You can do this using the Select function from the reflect package:

func Select(cases []SelectCase) (chosen int, recv Value, recvOK bool)

Select executes a select operation described by the list of cases. Like the Go select statement, it blocks until at least one of the cases can proceed, makes a uniform pseudo-random choice, and then executes that case. It returns the index of the chosen case and, if that case was a receive operation, the value received and a boolean indicating whether the value corresponds to a send on the channel (as opposed to a zero value received because the channel is closed).

You pass in an array of SelectCase structs that identify the channel to select on, the direction of the operation, and a value to send in the case of a send operation.

So you could do something like this:

cases := make([]reflect.SelectCase, len(chans))
for i, ch := range chans {
    cases[i] = reflect.SelectCase{Dir: reflect.SelectRecv, Chan: reflect.ValueOf(ch)}
}
chosen, value, ok := reflect.Select(cases)
// ok will be true if the channel has not been closed.
ch := chans[chosen]
msg := value.String()

You can experiment with a more fleshed out example here: http://play.golang.org/p/8zwvSk4kjx

You can accomplish this by wrapping each channel in a goroutine which "forwards" messages to a shared "aggregate" channel. For example:

agg := make(chan string)
for _, ch := range chans {
  go func(c chan string) {
    for msg := range c {
      agg <- msg
    }
  }(ch)
}

select {
case msg <- agg:
    fmt.Println("received ", msg)
}

If you need to know which channel the message originated from, you could wrap it in a struct with any extra information before forwarding it to the aggregate channel.

In my (limited) testing, this method greatly out performs using the reflect package:

$ go test dynamic_select_test.go -test.bench=.
...
BenchmarkReflectSelect         1    5265109013 ns/op
BenchmarkGoSelect             20      81911344 ns/op
ok      command-line-arguments  9.463s

Benchmark code here

To expand on some comments on previous answers and to provide a clearer comparison here is an example of both approaches presented so far given the same input, a slice of channels to read from and a function to call for each value which also need to know which channel the value came from.

There are three main differences between the approaches:

• Complexity. Although it may partially be a reader preference I find the channel approach more idiomatic, straight-forward, and readable.

• Performance. On my Xeon amd64 system the goroutines+channels out performs the reflect solution by about two orders of magnitude (in general reflection in Go is often slower and should only be used when absolutely required). Of course, if there is any significant delay in either the function processing the results or in the writing of values to the input channels this performance difference can easily become insignificant.

• Blocking/buffering semantics. The importantance of this depends on the use case. Most often it either won't matter or the slight extra buffering in the goroutine merging solution may be helpful for throughput. However, if it is desirable to have the semantics that only a single writer is unblocked and it's value fully handled before any other writer is unblocked, then that can only be achieved with the reflect solution.

Note, both approaches can be simplified if either the "id" of the sending channel isn't required or if the source channels will never be closed.

Goroutine merging channel:

// Process1 calls `fn` for each value received from any of the `chans`
// channels. The arguments to `fn` are the index of the channel the
// value came from and the string value. Process1 returns once all the
// channels are closed.
func Process1(chans []<-chan string, fn func(int, string)) {
    // Setup
    type item struct {
        int    // index of which channel this came from
        string // the actual string item
    }
    merged := make(chan item)
    var wg sync.WaitGroup
    wg.Add(len(chans))
    for i, c := range chans {
        go func(i int, c <-chan string) {
            // Reads and buffers a single item from `c` before
            // we even know if we can write to `merged`.
            //
            // Go doesn't provide a way to do something like:
            //     merged <- (<-c)
            // atomically, where we delay the read from `c`
            // until we can write to `merged`. The read from
            // `c` will always happen first (blocking as
            // required) and then we block on `merged` (with
            // either the above or the below syntax making
            // no difference).
            for s := range c {
                merged <- item{i, s}
            }
            // If/when this input channel is closed we just stop
            // writing to the merged channel and via the WaitGroup
            // let it be known there is one fewer channel active.
            wg.Done()
        }(i, c)
    }
    // One extra goroutine to watch for all the merging goroutines to
    // be finished and then close the merged channel.
    go func() {
        wg.Wait()
        close(merged)
    }()

    // "select-like" loop
    for i := range merged {
        // Process each value
        fn(i.int, i.string)
    }
}

Reflection select:

// Process2 is identical to Process1 except that it uses the reflect
// package to select and read from the input channels which guarantees
// there is only one value "in-flight" (i.e. when `fn` is called only
// a single send on a single channel will have succeeded, the rest will
// be blocked). It is approximately two orders of magnitude slower than
// Process1 (which is still insignificant if their is a significant
// delay between incoming values or if `fn` runs for a significant
// time).
func Process2(chans []<-chan string, fn func(int, string)) {
    // Setup
    cases := make([]reflect.SelectCase, len(chans))
    // `ids` maps the index within cases to the original `chans` index.
    ids := make([]int, len(chans))
    for i, c := range chans {
        cases[i] = reflect.SelectCase{
            Dir:  reflect.SelectRecv,
            Chan: reflect.ValueOf(c),
        }
        ids[i] = i
    }

    // Select loop
    for len(cases) > 0 {
        // A difference here from the merging goroutines is
        // that `v` is the only value "in-flight" that any of
        // the workers have sent. All other workers are blocked
        // trying to send the single value they have calculated
        // where-as the goroutine version reads/buffers a single
        // extra value from each worker.
        i, v, ok := reflect.Select(cases)
        if !ok {
            // Channel cases[i] has been closed, remove it
            // from our slice of cases and update our ids
            // mapping as well.
            cases = append(cases[:i], cases[i+1:]...)
            ids = append(ids[:i], ids[i+1:]...)
            continue
        }

        // Process each value
        fn(ids[i], v.String())
    }
}

[Full code on the Go playground.]

Possibly simpler option:

Instead of having an array of channels, why not pass just one channel as a parameter to the functions being run on separate goroutines, and then listen to the channel in a consumer goroutine?

This allows you to select on just one channel in your listener, making for a simple select, and avoiding creation of new goroutines to aggregate messages from multiple channels?

We actually made some research about this subject and found the best solution. We used reflect.Select for a while and it is a great solution for the problem. It is much lighter than a goroutine per channel and simple to operate. But unfortunately, it doesn't really support a massive amount of channels which is our case so we found something interesting and wrote a blog post about it: https://cyolo.io/blog/how-we-enabled-dynamic-channel-selection-at-scale-in-go/

I'll summarize what is written there: We statically created batches of select..case statements for every result of the power of two of exponent up to 32 along with a function that routes to the different cases and aggregates the results through an aggregate channel.

An example of such a batch:

func select4(ctx context.Context, chanz []chan interface{}, res chan *r, r *r, i int) {
    select {
    case r.v, r.ok = <-chanz[0]:
        r.i = i + 0
        res <- r
    case r.v, r.ok = <-chanz[1]:
        r.i = i + 1
        res <- r
    case r.v, r.ok = <-chanz[2]:
        r.i = i + 2
        res <- r
    case r.v, r.ok = <-chanz[3]:
        r.i = i + 3
        res <- r
    case <-ctx.Done():
        break
    }
}

And the logic of aggregating the first result from any number of channels using these kinds of select..case batches:

    for i < len(channels) {
        l = len(channels) - i
        switch {
        case l > 31 && maxBachSize >= 32:
            go select32(ctx, channels[i:i+32], agg, rPool.Get().(*r), i)
            i += 32
        case l > 15 && maxBachSize >= 16:
            go select16(ctx, channels[i:i+16], agg, rPool.Get().(*r), i)
            i += 16
        case l > 7 && maxBachSize >= 8:
            go select8(ctx, channels[i:i+8], agg, rPool.Get().(*r), i)
            i += 8
        case l > 3 && maxBachSize >= 4:
            go select4(ctx, channels[i:i+4], agg, rPool.Get().(*r), i)
            i += 4
        case l > 1 && maxBachSize >= 2:
            go select2(ctx, channels[i:i+2], agg, rPool.Get().(*r), i)
            i += 2
        case l > 0:
            go select1(ctx, channels[i], agg, rPool.Get().(*r), i)
            i += 1
        }
    }