That kind of suffers if you want to be able to cheaply cancel the iteration. Lets say the logic is: for item := range list { if condition(item) {

That kind of suffers if you want to be able to cheaply cancel the iteration. Lets say the logic is: for item := range list { if condition(item) { break } } That is nice and readable, but if the thing your iterating is returning items in a batch then this gets far, far uglier. Its possible to end up with one loop that fetches x items at a time, and another that iterates over those items.. etc. But if you switch that to channels you maintain the readability and everything is nice! .. Except, you need a way to cancel the iteration, and it can't be closing the channel or the writer will panic. items, cancelFunc := apiCall() for item := range items { if condition(items) { cancelFunc() for _ := range items { } break } } close(items) Now, this is even worse if you need some kind of finalization of the goroutine that spawns to write to the given channel. Now you have a wait group, or a second channel.. etc. If its possible to error in the middle of iteration then things get complicated as well.