[ianlancetaylor]

When Go gets a precise collector, simple implementations of this will work. Doing this kind of thing in Go requires importing the "unsafe" package, and any memory allocations done by code importing "unsafe" could be marked as possibly a pointer.

However, it would probably be possible to write code involving two packages, one of which does not import "unsafe", to lead to dangling pointers and eventual crashes. That is why you should be careful about code that imports "unsafe".

[pcwalton]

Actually, the code sample in the grandparent comment obfuscates the memory address by subtracting 1. Even a conservative GC will be confused in this case...

[ianlancetaylor]

Ah, yes, missed that. Nothing a GC can do about code like that. At least it remains true that this can only happen in Go if you explicitly import "unsafe".