Pipe

In Go a pipe is synchronous in-memory pipe. pipe is a type that is not publicly exposed. However, io allows us to interact with it through PipeWriter and PipeReader. In order to create these two halves of the pipe, io has a function:

func Pipe() (*PipeReader, *PipeWriter)

Just for having the full picture, and to see how it works under the hood, this is how pipe is defined:

// A pipe is the shared pipe structure underlying PipeReader and PipeWriter.
type pipe struct {
	wrMu sync.Mutex // Serializes Write operations
	wrCh chan []byte
	rdCh chan int
	once sync.Once // Protects closing done
	done chan struct{}
	rerr onceError
	werr onceError
}

Again, as consumers of pipe we only care about PipeReader and PipeWriter.

It can be used to connect code expecting an io.Reader with code expecting an io.Writer.

Sometimes it can happen that we hold an io.Reader, but we need to call a function that expects an io.Writer. Pipe is a really good tool for acheiving it.

The data is copied directly from the io.Write to the corresponding io.Read (or Reads) there is no internal buffering.

Video about pipes

I really suggest anyone to visit this video to get a deeper understanding on how to use pipes.