Defer called in go routine

Question

I believe I understand defer well in the normal use cases. Such as the one listed in this question Golang defer behavior. However I am a little perplexed as to what is happening when defer is called inside a goroutine that does not return. Here is the code in question.

func start_consumer() {
    conn, _ := amqp.Dial("amqp://username:[email protected]")
    //defer conn.Close()

    ch, _ := conn.Channel()
    //defer ch.Close()

    q, _ := ch.QueueDeclare(
        "test", // name
        true,   // durable
        false,  // delete when unused
        false,  // exclusive
        false,  // no-wait
        nil,    // arguments
    )

    _ = ch.Qos(
        3,     // prefetch count
        0,     // prefetch size
        false, // global
    )

    forever := make(chan bool)

    go func() {
        for {
            msgs, _ := ch.Consume(
                q.Name, // queue
                "",     // consumer
                false,  // ack
                false,  // exclusive
                false,  // no-local
                false,  // no-wait
                nil,    // args
            )

            for d := range msgs {
                log.Printf("Received a message: %s", d.Body)
                d.Ack(true)
            }

            time.Sleep(1 * time.Second)
        }
    }()

    log.Printf(" [*] Waiting for messages. To exit press CTRL+C")
    <-forever
}

This function is called from

go start_consumer()

This is likely a misunderstanding by me how channels work but I though forever would not return since it's waiting for a value to be passed to it.

Answer 1

The Go Blog's Defer, Panic, and Recover post referenced in the previous question does a great job explaining how defer statements work.

A defer statement pushes a function call onto a list. The list of saved calls is executed after the surrounding function returns. Defer is commonly used to simplify functions that perform various clean-up actions.

In your case since the goroutine does not return, the list of deferred calls will never be run. This makes the defer statement unnecessary in this context.