fastlane

Fast single-producer / single-consumer channels for Go.

A fastlane channel works similar to a standard Go channel with the following exceptions:

• It does not have a close method. A sender must send the receiver a custom close message.
• It's unbounded and has no buffering. There's lock-free linked list under the hood.
• It expects to be communicating over a maximum of two goroutines. One for Send and one for Recv.

Getting Started

Installing

To start using fastlane, install Go and run go get:

$ go get -u github.com/tidwall/fastlane

This will retrieve the library.

Usage

There're only two functions Send and Recv.

// chan.go
package main

import "github.com/tidwall/fastlane"

func main() {
	var ch fastlane.Chan

	go func() { ch.Send("ping") }()

	v := ch.Recv()
	println(v.(string))
}

$ go run chan.go 
ping

Performance

The benchmark tests the speed of sending integers between two goroutines.

$ go test -run none -bench .

MacBook Pro 15" 2.8 GHz Intel Core i7 (darwin/amd64)

BenchmarkFastlaneChan-8   	20000000	        72.7 ns/op
BenchmarkGoChan-8         	 5000000	       241 ns/op

Mac mini i7-3615QM CPU @ 2.30GHz (linux/amd64)

BenchmarkFastlaneChan-8   	10000000	       105 ns/op
BenchmarkGoChan-8         	 3000000	       602 ns/op

Raspberry Pi 3 (linux/arm64)

BenchmarkFastlaneChan-4   	 5000000	       393 ns/op
BenchmarkGoChan-4         	 1000000	      1337 ns/op

Raspberry Pi 3 (linux/arm)

BenchmarkFastlaneChan-4   	 3000000	       535 ns/op
BenchmarkGoChan-4         	 1000000	      2195 ns/op

Contact

Josh Baker @tidwall

License

fastlane source code is available under the MIT License.