[voidlogic]

>Am I implicitly creating goroutines by using channels or am I simply creating a buffer?

A channel is just a thread-safe queue. An unbuffered channel blocks until something else receives the sent value. A buffered channel allows n sends until it blocks. Using a channel will never create a new goroutine, its just a way send data. You can use a select statment to wait on sending or reciving from multiple channels or to send or get without being blocked by a full or empty channel.

In C you could put together a RW mutex, condition and a linked list or array and have the same thing pretty much.... If you want to create a goroutine you need to invoke "go X".

Out of curiosity, do you know C/C++ or Java?