What does HackerNews think of tableflip?

> Some of this is probably going to have to be done in your application...

FWICT tableflip does exactly this: https://github.com/cloudflare/tableflip

Go's channels aren't exposed outside a specific go process's runtime. The runtime doesn't give you any convenient way to redirect them. They're not like erlang's mailboxes at all in that regard.

Furthermore, channels aren't the primitive used for multiplexing IO / handling connections on a socket in go. You typically have a goroutine (e.g. 'http.ListenAndServe' spins up goroutines), and the gorutines are managed not by channels, but by the internal go runtime's scheduler and IO implementation (which internally uses epoll).

Because of all those things, replacing a running go process that's listening on sockets is no different from that same problem in C. You end up using SO_REUSEPORT and then passing the file-descriptors to the new process and converting them back into listeners. Channels don't end up factoring into it meaningfully.

If you're interested in what this looks like, cloudflare wrote a library called tableflip [0] which does this. I also forked that library [1] to handle file-descriptor handoff in a more generic way, so I've ended up digging pretty deeply into the details of how this works in go.

[0]: https://github.com/cloudflare/tableflip

[1]: https://github.com/ngrok/tableroll