Goroutine leak: goroutines blocked on channel receive never collected

Goroutines blocked waiting on a channel that is never closed or written to stay alive forever. The Go runtime has no garbage collection for blocked goroutines, so memory and resources leak silently.

Always ensure every goroutine has an exit path. Use a done channel or context cancellation:

func worker(ctx context.Context, jobs <-chan Job) {
    for {
        select {
        case <-ctx.Done():
            return // exits when context is cancelled
        case j, ok := <-jobs:
            if !ok {
                return // exits when channel is closed
            }
            process(j)
        }
    }
}

Detect leaks with goleak in tests:

import "go.uber.org/goleak"

func TestMain(m *testing.M) {
    goleak.VerifyTestMain(m)
}

The Go scheduler parks goroutines blocked on channel operations. Without an explicit wakeup (send, close, or select with context), they never unpark. The GC cannot collect goroutines that are still reachable through channel references.