Which is to say: yes! Many do it with channels currently.

It's awful, but they do it.

The design of channels is constrained by the need to support concurrency. If you do not need concurrency, using something designed to support it will be suboptimal. And because it's specifically concurrency, the overhead will be substantial.

... that's the theory behind it. For more grounded explanations, see [1] & [2].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29510751

[2] https://ewencp.org/blog/golang-iterators/index.html

Yeah, I kind forgot we don't have anything concurrency related here.

Thanks for the links!

Channels and the goroutine scheduler need to be thread safe. They use locks and/or synchronized instructions that run much slower because they need to synchronize between the different cores of your CPU (or between CPUs, if you have more than one, which is slower still.) Running goroutines also saves and restores registers, trash part of the cache, or move to another core with a cold cache. Threads have more overhead, and processes more still, but that still is very slow.