title: How best do I keep a long running Go program, running?
body: <p>I've a long running server written in Go.  Main fires off several goroutines where the logic of the program executes.  After that main does nothing useful.  Once main exits, the program will quit.  The method I am using right now to keep the program running is just a simple call to fmt.Scanln().  I'd like to know how others keep main from exiting.  Below is a basic example.  What ideas or best practices could be used here?</p>
  
  <p>I considered creating a channel and delaying exit of main by receiving on said channel, but I think that could be problematic if all my goroutines become inactive at some point.</p>
  
  <p>Side note:  In my server (not the example), the program isn't actually running connected to a shell, so it doesn't really make sense to interact with the console anyway.  For now it works, but I'm looking for the "correct" way, assuming there is one.</p>
  
  <pre><code>package main
  
  import (
      "fmt"
      "time"
  )
  
  func main() {
      go forever()
      //Keep this goroutine from exiting
      //so that the program doesn't end.
      //This is the focus of my question.
      fmt.Scanln()
  }
  
  func forever() {
      for ; ; {
      //An example goroutine that might run
      //indefinitely. In actual implementation
      //it might block on a chanel receive instead
      //of time.Sleep for example.
          fmt.Printf("%v+\n", time.Now())
          time.Sleep(time.Second)
      }
  }
  </code></pre>