I like Go a lot, but I often wish we could be more explicit about where allocations are. It’s often important for writing performant code, but instead of having semantics we have to check against the stack analyzer which has poor ergonomics and may break at any time.
But yeah, to your point, returning a slice in a GC language is not some exotic thing.
I think I would like a “stackvar” declaration that works the same as “var” except my code won’t compile if escape analysis shows it would wind up on the heap. I say that knowing I’m not a language designer and have never written a compiler. This may be an obviously bad idea to somebody experienced in either of those.
I commented elsewhere on this post that I rarely have to think about stacks and heaps when writing Go, so maybe this isn’t my issue to care about either.
Can you elaborate on the stack analyzer? All I could figure out was to see runtime.morestack calls that affected the runtime, but as far I remember the caller timings did exclude the cost. Having a clearer view of stack grow rates would be really great.
But yeah, to your point, returning a slice in a GC language is not some exotic thing.