RingChan

RingChan is a thread-safe, fixed-capacity ring buffer implemented as a channel in Go. It mimics Go's channel behavior while providing ring-buffer semantics — meaning new items overwrite the oldest when full.

Features

• Fixed-size buffer with overwrite behavior
• Range-friendly: can be iterated using for ... range
• Safe for concurrent producers and consumers

Installation

go get github.com/floatdrop/ringchan

Usage

package main

import (
	"fmt"
	"time"

	"github.com/floatdrop/ringchan"
)

func main() {
	input := make(chan string, 5)
	ring := ringchan.New(input, 3)

	go func() {
		inputs := []string{"A", "B", "C", "D", "E"}
		for _, v := range inputs {
			input <- v
		}
		close(input)
	}()

	time.Sleep(50 * time.Millisecond)

	for v := range ring.C {
		fmt.Println("Got:", v)
	}

	// Output:
	// Got: C
	// Got: D
	// Got: E
}

Benchmarks

go test -bench=. -benchmem

goos: darwin
goarch: arm64
pkg: github.com/floatdrop/ringchan
cpu: Apple M1 Pro
BenchmarkSingleSender-10       	 7097070	       167.3 ns/op	       0 B/op	       0 allocs/op
BenchmarkParallelSenders-10    	 4145682	       295.0 ns/op	       0 B/op	       0 allocs/op
PASS
coverage: 90.9% of statements
ok  	github.com/floatdrop/ringchan	3.050s

For high-throughput write-heavy workloads it is better to use preallocated ringbuffer, like https://github.com/peterbourgon/rb

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE file for details.