I'm currently reading the slices of Go Concurrency Patterns. I'm a little bit confused about a seeming contradiction between a statement on slide #16:
When main returns, the program exits and takes the boring function down with it.
and another one on slide #19 (in combination with the example on slide #20):
A channel in Go provides a connection between two goroutines, allowing them to communicate.
If main is just a goroutine, how can it cause any another (spawned) goroutine to stop, in other words: in what sense is the goroutine named main special?*
* I searched for it, but found nothing obviously enlightening so far; the SO question with the promising title Difference between the main goroutine and spawned goroutines of a Go program asks for a completely different issue.
edit: changed the title, to focus on the difference between main and "normal" goroutines (after stumbling upon the Go runtime function Goexit)
edit: simplified question, to be even more focused on the specifics of main
I think you need to consider the goroutine implications separately to the process implications.
The main() function is a goroutine (or if you want to be really picky, called from an implicitly created goroutine). Using go creates other goroutines. Returning from main() terminates its goroutine but also terminates the process as a whole (and thus all other goroutines). It is also possible to terminate the process as a whole by calling os.Exit() or similar from any goroutine.