[jeffbee]

I don't think this information in Go is used for debugging alone. It's also used by mallocgc and other parts of the runtime. This is why you will see "gentraceback" in the profiles of busy Go servers. It's not because your program is printing a lot of stack traces, it's because stack walking is a core part of the GC, and because some logic in the runtime refers to the names of functions to branch around special cases.

[londons_explore]

I assume those bits of runtime could be modified to have other special markers on the functions they need to special case...

[jeffbee]

Yeah, that a function's name begins with "runtime." is 1 bit of information at most. But now we're talking about the optimal representation, not whether this information should exist.