Example of channel communication with a simple select statement. Taken from Rob Pike's slides about concurrency in Go.

channels_select.go

package main

import (
  "fmt"
	"time"
)

func boring(msg string) <-chan string { // Returns receive-only channel of strings.
	c := make(chan string)
	go func() { // We launch the goroutine from inside the function.
		for i := 0; ; i++ {
			c <- fmt.Sprintf("%s %d", msg, i)
			time.Sleep(400 * time.Millisecond)
		}
	}()
	return c // Return the channel to the caller.
}

func main() {
	c := boring("Joe")
	timeout := time.After(2 * time.Second)
	for {
		select {
		case s := <-c:
			fmt.Println(s)
		case <-timeout:
			fmt.Println("You talk too much.")
			return
		}
	}
}

1. The channel is returned to the main before the boring function finishes
2. The time.After function actually returns a channel on which the current time will be sent after the specified interval.