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by jjbiotech 2400 days ago
Right. So:

* Don't require users of your API to start [additional] goroutines to use your API correctly.

1 comments

I guess what I mean to say is: don't make your users write

    go yourpackage.YourApiCall()
in order to use the API correctly. That's just a guess, though.
The article says almost exactly the opposite, and I agree.

Your API should present all of the things it does as synchronous functions/methods. If callers want to run them asynchronously, they can easily provide their own goroutine to do so, including whatever lifecycle management makes sense for them.

The concrete example was

    // Do this
    func (t *type) Run(ctx context.Context) { ... }

    // Not this    
    func (t *type) Start()  { ... }
    func (t *type) Cancel() { ... }
This is generally good advice which stops a whole class of extremely common and very tricky to debug orchestration bugs outright.