> But instead, I have to spawn two more goroutines, one to "monitor" (really, read) from inbound, and one for outbound.

What does Golang's select/case not do that you want?

Is there some feature of the language or the libraries that I am missing that turns a socket (err, a TCPConn) into a channel that I can read with Golang's select construction? Seriously asking. That would be awesome.

No, I think you would need to wrap the TCPConn in a goroutine that does the Read, handles any errors, then passes the bytes back to the consumer via a channel. At least it would be a very generic and small goroutine to do this.

I agree that would be a nice feature though.

You know what's happening in this thread? I made it sound like I was criticizing Go for needing to spawn goroutines to do this. I'm not! It makes sense, in the context of Go, to do it this way, even though as a C programmer by training that's not my first thought on how to do it.

I'm not criticizing Go for being anti-event; I'm just observing that it is. Idiomatic Go --- like, the code in the standard library --- has a strong bias towards straight-line code.

> I'm not criticizing Go for being anti-event; I'm just observing that it is. Idiomatic Go --- like, the code in the standard library --- has a strong bias towards straight-line code.

I think I understand where you are coming from now - I think you are saying Go is "anti-event-based-callback-driven" rather than "anti-event-loop-implementation" - which is absolutely true. Go's concurrency model is build on CSP (Hoare's Communicating Sequential Processes)[1] which seems to advocate procedural threads rather than callbacks.

[1] http://golang.org/doc/go_faq.html#goroutines

Is there a large overhead for having to use a goroutine rather than the lower level? Do you think it's appropriate for Go to expose that, or do you just miss it?

> Is there a large overhead for having to use a > goroutine rather than the lower level?

No.