I'm coming predominately from other languages, so it took me a hot minute to figure out what the various bug were.

• channels are by default "unbuffered", in that a send needs a waiting recv to actually do the send, and blocks until such. The addition of the buffer prevents the block & permits the goroutine to progress (and eventually exit, and thus, not leak) … so long as the buffer is sufficiently large enough.

• channels do not, AFAICT, realize when the receiver is gone, and will block indefinitely even when there is no receiver. (It is the same "chan" object, I think, in both sender/receiver / there is no distinction. So, the single object is never GC'd.)

• goroutines are not GC'd. (& the code doesn't/can't hold like, a reference or a handle to a goroutine / there is no "join" primitive.)