Take the example of a simple proxy to see where I'm coming from. Sure, I'm happy to have Go manage all the connections and sockets and I'm happy to spawn new goroutines for each connection and all that. But a proxy accepts an inbound connection, makes an outbound connection, and then monitors the outbound and inbound sides for data. The loop to do this with sockets could be a simple two-descriptor read select(2) call. But instead, I have to spawn two more goroutines, one to "monitor" (really, read) from inbound, and one for outbound.