The take() function is equivalent to a bare <- channel read. the poll(time, timeunit) function is equivalent to a select with a case and a read off the done channel of a context with a timeout. The poll() function is equivalent to a select with a case and a default condition.

To get the behavior of a select composed of several channels and no default case I'd have to dig into the exact behavior of the select statement in go, but it could be accomplished with a loop over if/else if/else statement where the else had a thread sleep/thread yield.

I actually wrote a dsl in Scala a few years back that actually used the keyword select for this operation before I'd ever encountered golang. I used "on" instead of case but the behaviors were nearly identical.