idiomatic goroutine termination and error handling

All but one of your goroutines are leaked, because they're still waiting to send to the errs channel - you never finish the for-range that empties it. You're also leaking the goroutine who's job is to close the errs channel, because the waitgroup is never finished.

(Also, as Andy pointed out, deleting from map is not thread-safe, so that'd need protection from a mutex.)

However, I don't think maps, mutexes, waitgroups, contexts etc. are even necessary here. I'd rewrite the whole thing to just use basic channel operations, something like the following:

package main

import (
    "fmt"
    "math/rand"
    "time"
)

func fetchAll() error {
    var N = 4
    quit := make(chan bool)
    errc := make(chan error)
    done := make(chan error)
    for i := 0; i < N; i++ {
        go func(i int) {
            // dummy fetch
            time.Sleep(time.Duration(rand.Intn(100)) * time.Millisecond)
            err := error(nil)
            if rand.Intn(2) == 0 {
                err = fmt.Errorf("goroutine %d's error returned", i)
            }
            ch := done // we'll send to done if nil error and to errc otherwise
            if err != nil {
                ch = errc
            }
            select {
            case ch <- err:
                return
            case <-quit:
                return
            }
        }(i)
    }
    count := 0
    for {
        select {
        case err := <-errc:
            close(quit)
            return err
        case <-done:
            count++
            if count == N {
                return nil // got all N signals, so there was no error
            }
        }
    }
}

func main() {
    rand.Seed(time.Now().UnixNano())
    fmt.Println(fetchAll())
}

Playground link: https://play.golang.org/p/mxGhSYYkOb

EDIT: There indeed was a silly mistake, thanks for pointing it out. I fixed the code above (I think...). I also added some randomness for added Realismâ„¢.

Also, I'd like to stress that there really are multiple ways to approach this problem, and my solution is but one way. Ultimately it comes down to personal taste, but in general, you want to strive towards "idiomatic" code - and towards a style that feels natural and easy to understand for you.


Using Error Group makes this even simpler. This automatically waits for all the supplied Go Routines to complete successfully, or cancels all those remaining in the case of any one routine returning an error (in which case that error is the one bubble back up to the caller).

package main

import (
        "context"
        "fmt"
        "math/rand"
        "time"

        "golang.org/x/sync/errgroup"
)

func fetchAll(ctx context.Context) error {
        errs, ctx := errgroup.WithContext(ctx)

        // run all the http requests in parallel
        for i := 0; i < 4; i++ {
                errs.Go(func() error {
                        // pretend this does an http request and returns an error                                                  
                        time.Sleep(time.Duration(rand.Intn(100)) * time.Millisecond)                                               
                        return fmt.Errorf("error in go routine, bailing")                                                      
                })
        }

        // Wait for completion and return the first error (if any)                                                                 
        return errs.Wait()
}

func main() {
        fmt.Println(fetchAll(context.Background()))
}