Yeah, the channel approach was rewrite #3 :P It required me to have shared state in a horrible way as well, ruining the whole thing. There really isn't an elegant/functional way to do it, and sharing channels is error-prone itself. I ended up closing the connection to terminate goroutine B from A, and messaging on an already-shared channel to terminate A from B.

Having cascading failures in Go would be fantastic. The problem, unfortunately, is not very amenable to elegant solutions. I might do a writeup at some point.