title: Making a journal file in golang
body: <p>I have a small project in Go that are receiving text lines over tcp to process. However, to ensure robustness, I want to create some sort of journal so that nothing is lost in case of power failure (e.g. a frame of data is received by my app, but is not yet processed).</p>
  
  <p>I have googled for any guides on how a journal file should be implemented, but the search results are heavily polluted by Oracle RDBMS documentation and such.</p>
  
  <p>My tought was something like: immediately after receiving a line, write it to a file with a "not processed flag". After processing, update the file so that this flag is cleared, opening for overwrites. At the same time as this flag is cleared, send an "processed ack" to the data sender. Perhaps its easiest to deal with fixed size "slots" in the journal to ensure that I can reuse freed slots rather than having a ever-increasing file and maintain a "free list" of unused slots.</p>
  
  <p>Is there any "best practice" for implementing such files in custom code, i.g.e with regards to file structure, padding and locking? Are there any concerns doing so in Go as it is cross-platform rather than using native file-system APIs?</p>