[go-nuts] "Go channels are bad and you should feel bad"

I'm assuming that by "nil" channel you mean one that has nothing in it?

There are lots of use cases for this; in fact, it's an important part
of using channels. For example, you might use this blocking to create
a simple semaphore using channels:

     sem := make(chan int, MaxJobs)

     func SomeJobHandler(queue chan *Job) {
         for job := range queue {
             job := job // Copy and shadow request since Go reuses vars
declared in the for statement
             sem <- 1// Will block after the buffer is full, eg. when
MaxJobs are running
             go func() {
               process(job) // Some expensive processing
               <-sem
             }()
         }
     }

Of course, this can be handled in other ways, but this is just an example.
Another common example can be found in the time package (the first
case won't be hit until the timeout time has passed):

     select {
     case <-After(timeout): // This is similar to calling sleep, except
that we can use it in a select statement where we definitely don't
want the read to panic!
         return // We've timed out
     default:
         // Do some work
     }

These are just a few simple examples of why we might want to block on
a channel read.