The kind of channels* the article talks about are not delivery mechanisms, but primarily a synchronization primitive. They have little to do with serialization,

The kind of channels* the article talks about are not delivery mechanisms, but primarily a synchronization primitive. They have little to do with serialization, and indeed "sending" references to data without having to encode them is critical in many cases. Besides, serializing data throws away type safety just as much as a catch-all type (in go, interface{}) does. * The naming "channel" is old: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communicating_sequential_processes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communicating_sequential_proce...