I’ve been learning Go for the past week, mostly from the official tour. Most of the syntax and features are similar to other languages - except for the channel construct which I’ve never seen before.

A channel is means of communication between goroutines. Goroutines are similar to a lightweight version of OS threads, handled by the Go runtime.

With channels, you can send and receive data between goroutines, making parallel processing easy. You can actually look at the official implementation of channels in the go code repo.

This talk also explained the working of channels in depth, the slides of which can be found here.