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> There is no proper way to cancel them, they need to cooperate via select/context

Isn’t this also true of threads? I know you can usually cancel them from a thread handle, but that kills the thread ~immediately without cleaning anything up, right? Presumably you pretty much always want cooperative cancellation?

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It's true for almost all pthread implementations, not all. But when talking about asynchronous I/O runtimes and coroutines, you have more options. Systems like Tokio, or zio (the one I'm working on), give you a task handle, and when you call `cancel()` on the handle, it will cancel whatever async operation the task is currently running. And it does so reliably.

These things were all known when development on Go began. But, as with so many other aspects of the language, if it wasn't known in the 80s/90s then it may as well not have existed.

I don’t know why people criticize Go for not being a cutting edge research language when that was very explicitly not the goal. Lots of things were available in the research at the time, and much of that has gone ~nowhere.

Starting with what they knew to work and iterating from there is wise.

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