How it works...

The Copy() function copies between interfaces and treats them like streams. Thinking of data as streams has a lot of practical uses, especially when working with network traffic or filesystems. The Copy() function also creates a multi-writer that combines two writer streams and writes to them twice using ReadSeeker. If a Reader interface were used instead rather than seeing exampleexample, you would only see example despite copying to the MultiWriter interface twice. There's also an example of a buffered write that you might use if your stream is not fit into the memory.

The PipeReader and PipeWriter structs implement io.Reader and io.Writer interfaces. They're connected, creating an in-memory pipe. The primary purpose of a pipe is to read from a stream while simultaneously writing from the same stream to a different source. In essence, it combines the two streams into a pipe.

Go interfaces are a clean abstraction to wrap data that performs common operations. This is made apparent when doing I/O operations, and so the io package is a great resource for learning about interface composition. The pipe package is often underused but provides great flexibility with thread-safety when linking input and output streams.