[pythonistic]

Only if you create a channel with no buffer: then it becomes blocking send or receive. Go channels block when they have nothing to do, either no room to send anything (in the case of a default channel with no buffer) or nothing to receive (when the channel has no messages).

It's not uncommon to use a select statement to allow work to continue (it may act like a loop) and wait to receive a message on a channel. This is the common pattern for handling timeouts: create a timer goroutine that will wake at a set time and send a message to a timeout channel, keep checking to see if work is done, and if the timer fires then cancel the select with an appropriate message (function call or return an error value).