Cheating the Reaper in Go

Even though I am a C++ programmer at heart, Go fascinates me for none of the reasons you think. Go has made several interesting design decisions: It has virtually no Undefined Behavior. It has very simple GC semantics that they’re mostly stuck with due to design decisions in the surface language. These things mean that despite Go having a GC, it’s possible to do manual memory management in pure Go and in cooperation with the GC (although without any help from the runtime package). To demonstrate this, we will be building an untyped, garbage-collected arena abstraction in Go which relies on several GC implementation details. I would never play this kind of game in Rust or C++, because LLVM is extremely intelligent and able to find all kinds of ways to break you over the course of frequent compiler upgrades. On the other hand, although Go does not promise any compatibility across versions for code that imports unsafe , in practice, two forces work against Go doing this: Go does not a ... Read full article.