[johncolanduoni]

Golang has a feature that I love in general but that makes it very easy to keep unintended allocations around. If you have a struct with a simple int field, and you store that somewhere as an *int, the entire struct and anything it points to will be kept alive. This is super useful for short-lived pointers, and super dangerous for long-lived pointers.

Most other widely used GCed languages don’t allow the use of arbitrary interior pointers (though most GCs can actually handle them at the register level).

[aleksi]

> If you have a struct with a simple int field, and you store that somewhere as an *int, the entire struct and anything it points to will be kept alive.

While Go allows interior pointers, I don't think what you say is true. runtime.KeepAlive was added exactly to prevent GC from collecting the struct when only a field pointer is stored. Take a look at this blog post, for example: https://victoriametrics.com/blog/go-runtime-finalizer-keepal...

[johncolanduoni]

I don’t believe that’s the case based on the example in the blog post. The fd field in that struct was passed into the later function by value (i.e. as an int, not an *int), so there was no interior pointer in play at all.

[aleksi]

You are right; I stand corrected