Timeouts

Context

You can implement timeouts using select with time.After. If a channel operation doesn’t complete within the timeout, the time.After case will execute.

Example

Wait for a channel that never sends, with a 1‑second timeout.

Code example

package main

import (
    "fmt"
    "time"
)

func main() {
    ch := make(chan string)
    go func() {
        time.Sleep(2 * time.Second)
        ch <- "result"
    }()

    select {
    case res := <-ch:
        fmt.Println(res)
    case <-time.After(1 * time.Second):
        fmt.Println("timeout")
    }
}

Output

timeout

Useful links

• Go by Example: Timeouts
• time.After documentation