[foldr]

What confuses people is

    int *foo(void) {
        int x = 99;
        return &x; // bad idea
    }

vs.

    func foo() *int {
        x := 99
        return &x // fine
    }

They think that Go, like C, will allocate x on the stack, and that returning a pointer to the value will therefore be invalid.

(Pedants: I'm aware that the official distinction in C is between automatic and non-automatic storage.)

[knorker]

Yes. That's escape analysis. But this is not what OP did.

What you wrote is not the same in C and Go, because GC and escape analysis. But 9rx is also correct that what OP wrote is the same in C and Go.

So OP almost learned about escape analysis, but their example didn't actually do it. So double confusion on their side.

[foldr]

Well, my point is that escape analysis has nothing to do with it at the semantic level. So it's actually just 'because GC'. You don't need the concept of escape analysis at all to understand the behavior of the Go example.

[knorker]

Yeah. That's what I said.

[foldr]

I mean that escape analysis has nothing to do with my example either, in terms of understand the semantics of the code (so I’m disagreeing with the ‘because GC and escape analysis’ part of your comment).

[knorker]

Your https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46234206 relies on escape analysis though, right?

Escape analysis is the reason your `x` is on the heap. Because it escaped. Otherwise it'd be on the stack.[1]

Now if by "semantics of the code" you mean "just pretend everything is on the heap, and you won't need to think about escape analysis", then sure.

Now in terms of what actually happens, your code triggers escape analysis, and OP does not.

[1] Well, another way to say this I guess is that without escape analysis, a language would be forced to never use the stack.

[foldr]

Escape analysis clearly isn’t part of the semantics of Go. For that to be the case, the language standard would have to specify exactly which values are guaranteed to be stack allocated. In reality, this depends on size thresholds which can vary from platform to platform or between different versions of the Go compiler. Is the following non-escaping array value stack allocated?

    func pointless() byte {
        var a byte[1024]
        a[0] = 1
        return a[0]
    }

That’s entirely up to the compiler, not something that’s determined by the language semantics. It could vary from platform to platform or compiler version to compiler version. So clearly you don’t need to think about the details of escape analysis to understand what your code does because in many cases you simply won’t know if your value is on the stack or not.