Is it OK to leave a channel open?

Question

Is it OK to leave a Go channel open forever (never close the channel) if I never check for its state? Will it lead to memory leaks? Is the following code OK?

Answer 1

Yes, it is ok to keep a channel open. As the go programming language book stated:

You needn't close every channel when you've finished with it. It's only necessary to close a channel when it is important to tell the receiving goroutines that all data have been sent. A channel that the garbage collector determinies to be unreachable will have its resources reclaimed whether or not it is closed. (Don't confuse this with the close operation for open files. It is important to call the Close method on every file when you've finished with it.)