While True Loop in Go

While loops do not actually exist within Go (golang), by name, but the same functionality is achievable with a for loop. Which is great, why have a ‘while’ when the same can be done with ‘for’.

Our example below shows how you get a Go program to print out a message every second to the screen. (You’ll have to exit to application to stop it, e.g. Ctrl+C)

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package main

import (
	"fmt"
	"time"
)

func main() {
	// Example of while true
	for true {
		fmt.Println("Run my code from gophercoding.com")
		time.Sleep(time.Second)
	}
}

If you need to exit this loop, if something went wrong, or a condition was meet then use the break clause.

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for true {
	break
}

Equally, if we need to check on a condition, we can replace the true with a variable.

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keepRunning := true
counter := 0
for keepRunning {
	if counter > 50 {
		break
	}
	counter += 1
}

Example In Action