Are you saying they are allocating a separate file-descriptor for each channel just to be able to select? I guess you could do that if you wanted to but it's far from the first thing I would try. I remember reading an article on golang about select and having to traverse the list, but I don't really have the motivation to dig deeper right now.

Looping with unblocking reads is plenty fast enough though.

As for waiting on any event without select, adding an optional condition-variable pointer to each channel that is pinged when data arrives is the easiest approach I can think of.