Have there been situations where you had to abandon the use of channels due to low performance?

Yes, in some cases, due to high-performance requirements, the use of channels can be a limitation. Channels in Go provide safety and synchronization but come with overhead for locking and goroutine context switching.

If a task requires extremely low latency or very high throughput, alternatives are sometimes used:

• Using non-blocking data structures (e.g., lock-free queues).
• Direct synchronization using mutexes and condition variables.
• Sharing data through shared memory with careful management of concurrent access.

However, such approaches are more complex to implement and can lead to errors, so channels remain the preferred means for most tasks where simplicity and safety are important.

Example of abandoning channels:

var mu sync.Mutex
var data int

// Instead of a channel, just protect access with a mutex
mu.Lock()
data = 42
mu.Unlock()