Go: Server should block until a message from the client is received - go

Question

I'm building some server/client application in Go (the language is new to me). I searched a lot and read a whole bunch of different examples but there is still one thing I can't find. Lets say I have a single server client up and running. The client will send some kind of a message to the server and vice versa. Encoding and decoding is done by the package gob.
This example is not my application, it is only a quick example:
package main
import (
"bytes"
"encoding/gob"
"fmt"
"log"
)
type Message struct {
Sender string
Receiver string
Command uint8
Value int64
}
func (message *Message) Set(sender string, receiver string, command uint8, value int64) *Message {
message.Sender = sender
message.Receiver = receiver
message.Command = command
message.Value = value
return message
}
func main() {
var network bytes.Buffer // Stand-in for a network connection
enc := gob.NewEncoder(&network) // Will write to network.
dec := gob.NewDecoder(&network) // Will read from network.
message := new(Message).Set("first", "second", 10, -1)
err := enc.Encode(*message) // send message
if err != nil {
log.Fatal("encode error:", err)
}
var m Message
err = dec.Decode(&m) // receice message
if err != nil {
log.Fatal("decode error:", err)
}
fmt.Printf("%q %q %d %d\n", m.Sender, m.Receiver, m.Command, m.Value)
}
This works fine, but I want the server to block until a new message is received so I can put the receiving process inside a infinite for loop inside a goroutine.
Something like that:
for {
// The server blocks HERE until a message from the client is received
fmt.Println("Received message:")
// Decode the new message
var m Message
err = dec.Decode(&m) // receice message
if err != nil {
log.Fatal("decode error:", err)
}
fmt.Printf("%q %q %d %d\n", m.Sender, m.Receiver, m.Command, m.Value)
}

Answer 1

The gob decoder blocks until it has read a full message or there's an error. The read loop in the question works as is.
working example on the playground

Answer 2

add a length header to the raw tcp stream.
that means, send a 4-bytes-length-header information to server before send the real load. and in server side read 4 bytes, allocate buffer, full read total message, and finally decode.
assume you have a tcp connection conn, in server side we could have:
func getInt(v []byte) int {
var r uint
r = 0
r |= uint(v[0]) << 24
r |= uint(v[1]) << 16
r |= uint(v[2]) << 8
r |= uint(v[3]) << 0
return int(r)
}
buf := make([]byte, 4)
_, err := io.ReadFull(conn, buf)
if err != nil {
return
}
length := getInt(buf)
buf = make([]byte, length)
_, err = io.ReadFull(conn, buf)
if err != nil {
return
}
//do gob decode from `buf` here
you may know client side refer the the server side source I think.