You'll actually see that's a general concurrency pattern, and I mean, far beyond Go. It is certainly ideal to trigger off of some signal (in a very, very generic sense of the term, not OS signal) in order to trigger some other process (again in a very generic sense), but in general if you're programming concurrent code you should always have some sort of time-based fallback for any wait you are doing, because you will hit it out in the field. It's all kinds of no fun to have processes that will wait forever. (Unless you're really sure you need it.)