A Quick Go hack: lines-per-second

Today I wanted to compare how fast two builds were on two different machines. As a rough estimate, I just wanted to see how many lines per second were going into the log file. This is what I came up with:

package main

import (
        "bufio"
        "fmt"
        "os"
        "time"
)

func main() {
        scn := bufio.NewScanner(os.Stdin)

        lines := 0

        go func() {
                for {
                        fmt.Fprintf(os.Stderr, "%v lps\n", lines)
                        lines = 0
                        time.Sleep(time.Second)
                }
        }()

        for scn.Scan() {
                lines++
        }

}

This is a quick hack. It’s not production quality, because there is a data race on lines. I think if I had to fix that race up, I’d choose to use sync/atomic’s ops. This because I’d only need to hit the two places lines is touched concurrently. A channel-based solution would be bigger and messier, not in tune with the minimal nature of this little program.

The equivalent program in Python or Perl or whatever would have been as short and sweet. That’s not the point. The point is that it was so easy to do in Go, I just did it in go without really even considering an alternative.