It's very important when looking at the channel method to realise that goroutines are NOT garbage collected. If there is any chance of the loop calling break or panicking, there is a chance of leaking goroutines. Since you might not know how your code is going to be used, this is an issue. A possible solution is to use two channels, the items channel and a fail channel. Whenever your iterator sends, it needs to use a select which either sends the item on the channel, or receives from a fail channel (in which case it exits the function.) I think while the channel method looks nice because of Go's special treatment of it's basic types (for better or worse,) it's not practically the best answer you should be using in your code.