In go, is there a way to execute code on termination of the program?

I know you can define functions called init in any package, and these function will be executed before main. I use this to open my log file and my DB connection.

Is there a way to define code that will be executed when the program ends, either because it reaches the end of the main function or because it was interrupted ? The only way I can think of is by manually calling a deffered terminate function on each package used by main, but that's quite verbose and error prone.

The C atexit functionality was considered by the Go developers and the idea of adopting it was rejected.

From one of the related thread at golang-nuts:

Russ Cox:

> Atexit may make sense in single-threaded, short-lived
programs, but I am skeptical that it has a place in a
long-running multi-threaded server.
I've seen many C++ programs that hang on exit because
they're running global destructors that don't really need to
run, and those destructors are cleaning up and freeing
memory that would be reclaimed by the operating system
anyway, if only the program could get to the exit system call.
Compared to all that pain, needing to call Flush when you're
one with a buffer seems entirely reasonable and is
necessary anyway for correct execution of long-running
programs.

> Even ignoring that problem, atexit introduces even more
threads of control, and you have to answer questions like
do all the other goroutines stop before the atexit handlers
run? If not, how do they avoid interfering? If so, what if
one holds a lock that the handler needs? And on and on.

> I'm not at all inclined to add Atexit.

Ian Lance Taylor:

> The only fully reliable mechanism is a wrapper program that invokes the
real program and does the cleanup when the real program completes. That
is true in any language, not just Go.

> In my somewhat unformed opinion, os.AtExit is not a great idea. It is
an unstructured facility that causes stuff to happen at program exit
time in an unpredictable order. It leads to weird scenarios like
programs that take a long time just to exit, an operation that should be
very fast. It also leads to weird functions like the C function _exit,
which more or less means exit-but-don't-run-atexit-functions.

> That said, I think a special exit function corresponding to the init
function is an interesting idea. It would have the structure that
os.AtExit lacks (namely, exit functions are run in reverse order of when
init functions are run).

> But exit functions won't help you if your program gets killed by the
kernel, or crashes because you call some C code that gets a segmentation
violation.

In general, I agree with jnml's answer. Should you however still want to do it, you could use defer in the main() function, like this: http://play.golang.org/p/aUdFXHtFOM.