What is context in Go and what is it used for?

In Go, context is a package that provides the Context type used for passing cancellation signals, deadlines, and other important values between goroutines.

Main purposes of context:

• Managing the lifetime of operations (e.g., canceling a request on timeout).
• Passing metadata (e.g., request identifiers for logging).
• Synchronizing cancellation of multiple related operations.

Example of usage:

ctx, cancel := context.WithTimeout(context.Background(), time.Second*5)
defer cancel()

select {
case <-time.After(time.Second * 10):
    fmt.Println("operation completed")
case <-ctx.Done():
    fmt.Println("operation cancelled or timed out")
}

Here, the context allows canceling the operation if it takes longer than 5 seconds.