Go Channels: A Critical Re-evaluation
2025-04-13
A seasoned Go developer delivers a critical assessment of Go's channel mechanism. While acknowledging Go's theoretical grounding in CSP and its reliance on channels and goroutines, the author argues that their practical implementation suffers from several shortcomings. These include potential goroutine leaks, performance inferiority to traditional synchronization primitives, and complex interactions with other concurrency mechanisms. The author advocates for cautious channel usage, suggesting mutexes and callbacks as superior alternatives in many scenarios. Improvements to the channel system are proposed, such as enabling selection on condition variables and enhancing garbage collection to manage unused channels.
Development
channels