All goroutines are async in some sense, so generally you don't need to return a channel. You can write the function as if it's synchronous, then the caller can call it in a goroutine and send to a channel if they want. This does force the caller to write some code, but the key is that you usually don't need to do this unless you're awaiting multiple results. If you're just awaiting a single result, you don't need anything explicit, and blocking on mutexes and IO will not block the OS thread running the goroutine. If you're awaiting multiple things, it's nice for the caller to handle it so they can use a single channel and an errorgroup. This is different from many async runtimes because of automatic cooperative yielding in goroutines. In many async runtimes, if you try to do this, the function that wasn't explicitly designed as async will block the executor and lead to issues, but in Go you can almost always just turn a "sync" function into explicitly async