Always have x number of goroutines running at any time

go goroutine

You may find Go Concurrency Patterns article interesting, especially Bounded parallelism section, it explains the exact pattern you need.

You can use channel of empty structs as a limiting guard to control number of concurrent worker goroutines:

package main

import "fmt"

func main() {
    maxGoroutines := 10
    guard := make(chan struct{}, maxGoroutines)

    for i := 0; i < 30; i++ {
        guard <- struct{}{} // would block if guard channel is already filled
        go func(n int) {
            worker(n)
            <-guard
        }(i)
    }
}

func worker(i int) { fmt.Println("doing work on", i) }

Here I think something simple like this will work :

package main

import "fmt"

const MAX = 20

func main() {
    sem := make(chan int, MAX)
    for {
        sem <- 1 // will block if there is MAX ints in sem
        go func() {
            fmt.Println("hello again, world")
            <-sem // removes an int from sem, allowing another to proceed
        }()
    }
}

Thanks to everyone for helping me out with this. However, I don't feel that anyone really provided something that both worked and was simple/understandable, although you did all help me understand the technique.

What I have done in the end is I think much more understandable and practical as an answer to my specific question, so I will post it here in case anyone else has the same question.

Somehow this ended up looking a lot like what OneOfOne posted, which is great because now I understand that. But OneOfOne's code I found very difficult to understand at first because of the passing functions to functions made it quite confusing to understand what bit was for what. I think this way makes a lot more sense:

package main

import (
"fmt"
"sync"
)

const xthreads = 5 // Total number of threads to use, excluding the main() thread

func doSomething(a int) {
    fmt.Println("My job is",a)
    return
}

func main() {
    var ch = make(chan int, 50) // This number 50 can be anything as long as it's larger than xthreads
    var wg sync.WaitGroup

    // This starts xthreads number of goroutines that wait for something to do
    wg.Add(xthreads)
    for i:=0; i<xthreads; i++ {
        go func() {
            for {
                a, ok := <-ch
                if !ok { // if there is nothing to do and the channel has been closed then end the goroutine
                    wg.Done()
                    return
                }
                doSomething(a) // do the thing
            }
        }()
    }

    // Now the jobs can be added to the channel, which is used as a queue
    for i:=0; i<50; i++ {
        ch <- i // add i to the queue
    }

    close(ch) // This tells the goroutines there's nothing else to do
    wg.Wait() // Wait for the threads to finish
}

Always have x number of goroutines running at any time

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