In a big Go application, most of the time you're not writing code that runs in the "main" thread. If you're writing a UI, you put the UI code in its own gorouti

In a big Go application, most of the time you're not writing code that runs in the "main" thread. If you're writing a UI, you put the UI code in its own goroutine, and pass messages to it. If you're writing a server, most of your code will be in your endpoint handlers, which run as their own goroutines. In >95% of your code, it's fine to just write `foo_val <- foo_chan`, without spawning a goroutine. From a pragmatic standpoint, it's not really different from `foo_val = expensive_foo_calculation()`. This block of code is waiting for something else to finish, and the Go runtime is smart enough to decide whether or not this thread should be parked until that result is ready. And, as a bonus, `foo_val = expensive_foo_calculation()` looks the same, even if the implementation launches 10 cpu-bound goroutines and reads from 30 files to do the work.