Using the "done" channel in Go

Fri, 27 Feb 2026 14:29:51 -0800

I wanted to document how a done channel is most commonly used.

Mainly because I’ve personally found it to be more confusing than it should be.

It usually looks a bit like this, when following a worker pattern:

func main() {
 var doneCh = make(chan struct{})

 // Perform some concurrent work
 // ...

 // Wait on that work
 for i := 0; i < 10; i++ {
 <-doneCh
 }
 
 // complete
}

I intentially left out a bit here to highlight what a “done” channel actually looks like.

Done Channel on A Blog for the Uninitialized

Using the "done" channel in Go