[burntsushi]

From what I know on the topic issue #909 only ever had a realistic chance of affecting 32-bit users. And from the looks of it, they've made the GC in Go 1.1 more precise, so hopefully the incidence of those problems on 32 bit goes down even more.

I use Go exclusively on 64 bit and have never had that problem. This includes Go programs that use 64GB+ of memory that can run for days. I also use other long running Go programs (a web site and an X window manager) and haven't run into problems.

> What are some common gotchas I should be wary of if I want to try out Go?

The most common complaint people have is that Go doesn't have "generics" like that found in most other statically typed languages (e.g., parametric polymorphism or ad-hoc polymorphism). You can still get a lot of code reuse through Go's flavor of polymorphism (structural sub-typing), but it requires a little brain rewiring---and that puts some folks off.