Implementing Timeouts with select in Go

In concurrent programming, it's crucial to prevent operations from blocking indefinitely. Go's select statement provides a powerful mechanism to handle multiple channel operations. This challenge focuses on using select to implement timeouts for long-running operations, a common and essential pattern for robust Go applications.

Problem Description

Your task is to write a Go function that simulates a time-consuming operation and uses the select statement to enforce a timeout. If the operation completes before the timeout, its result should be returned. If the timeout occurs first, an appropriate indication of the timeout should be returned.

Specifically, you need to:

• Create a function that accepts two parameters: a duration for the timeout and a channel that will receive the result of a simulated operation.
• Inside this function, use a select statement.
• One case in the select should listen on the provided result channel.
• Another case should listen on a time.After channel, which will trigger after the specified timeout duration.
• The function should return a value indicating either the result from the operation or that a timeout occurred.

Examples

Example 1:

Input: timeout = 500ms, resultChan will send "Success!" after 200ms
Output: "Success!"
Explanation: The simulated operation completes before the timeout, so its result is returned.

Example 2:

Input: timeout = 200ms, resultChan will send "Success!" after 500ms
Output: "Operation timed out"
Explanation: The timeout occurs before the simulated operation completes, so the timeout message is returned.

Example 3:

Input: timeout = 1s, resultChan will never send a value
Output: "Operation timed out"
Explanation: Since the result channel never receives a value, the `time.After` channel eventually triggers, indicating a timeout.

Constraints

• The timeout duration will be a non-negative time.Duration.
• The result channel will be a chan string.
• The function should handle cases where the result channel might never be written to.
• The function should be efficient and not introduce unnecessary overhead.

Notes

• Consider how to gracefully handle the case where the result channel might be closed by another goroutine.
• The time.After function is a convenient way to create a channel that sends the current time after a specified duration.
• Think about the order of operations within the select statement and how it affects the outcome.