What is the Advantage of sync.WaitGroup over Channels?

Question

I\'m working on a concurrent Go library, and I stumbled upon two distinct patterns of synchronization between goroutines whose results are similar:

Waitgroup

Answer 1

I often use channels to collect error messages from goroutines that could produce an error. Here is a simple example:

func couldGoWrong() (err error) {
    errorChannel := make(chan error, 3)

    // start a go routine
    go func() (err error) {
        defer func() { errorChannel <- err }()

        for c := 0; c < 10; c++ {
            _, err = fmt.Println(c)
            if err != nil {
                return
            }
        }

        return
    }()

    // start another go routine
    go func() (err error) {
        defer func() { errorChannel <- err }()

        for c := 10; c < 100; c++ {
            _, err = fmt.Println(c)
            if err != nil {
                return
            }
        }

        return
    }()

    // start yet another go routine
    go func() (err error) {
        defer func() { errorChannel <- err }()

        for c := 100; c < 1000; c++ {
            _, err = fmt.Println(c)
            if err != nil {
                return
            }
        }

        return
    }()

    // synchronize go routines and collect errors here
    for c := 0; c < cap(errorChannel); c++ {
        err = <-errorChannel
        if err != nil {
            return
        }
    }

    return
}