You're right that sync/atomic could've taken care of this, I wasn't aware of that package and figured channels were the way to go in Go.

As for making the waiting chan buffered, the reason I wanted to keep track of pending connections and active connections is because I'd like to proxy from a high-power server to a low-power server such as a Raspberry Pi. I agree with you that it could have done without though.

Thanks for the tips! :-)