Python-style generators in Go

Question

I'm currently working through the Tour of Go, and I thought that goroutines have been used similarly to Python generators, particularly with Question 66. I thought 66 looked complex, so I rewrote it to this:

package main

import "fmt"

func fibonacci(c chan int) {
    x, y := 1, 1

    for {
        c <- x
        x, y = y, x + y
    }
}

func main() {
    c := make(chan int)
    go fibonacci(c)

    for i := 0; i < 10; i++ {
        fmt.Println(<-c)
    }
}

This seems to work. A couple of questions:

1. If I turn up the buffer size on the channel to say, 10, fibonacci would fill up 10 further spots, as quickly as possible, and main would eat up the spots as quickly as it could go. Is this right? This would be more performant than a buffer size of 1 at the expense of memory, correct?
2. As the channel doesn't get closed by the fibonacci sender, what happens memory-wise when we go out of scope here? My expectation is that once c and go fibonacci is out of scope, the channel and everything on it gets garbage-collected. My gut tells me this is probably not what happens.

Answer 1

Yes, increasing the buffer size might drastically increase the execution speed of your program, because it will reduce the number of context switches. Goroutines aren't garbage-collected, but channels are. In your example, the fibonacci goroutine will run forever (waiting for another goroutine to read from the channel c), and the channel c will never be destroyed, because the fib-goroutine is still using it.

Here is another, sightly different program, which do not lack memory and is imho more similar to Python's generators:

package main

import "fmt"

func fib(n int) chan int {
    c := make(chan int)
    go func() {
        x, y := 0, 1
        for i := 0; i <= n; i++ {
            c <- x
            x, y = y, x+y
        }
        close(c)
    }()
    return c
}

func main() {
    for i := range fib(10) {
        fmt.Println(i)
    }
}

Alternatively, if you do not know how many Fibonacci numbers you want to generate, you have to use another quit channel so that you can send the generator goroutine a signal when it should stop. This is whats explained in golang's tutorial https://tour.golang.org/concurrency/4.