> You don't have much control over allocation in Go
Maybe you mean something different by "control over allocation"? Go does allow that, for example "The Journey of Go's Garbage Collector" talk has a good summary,
Specifically the sections about value-oriented programming are exactly that: Go allows the developer to avoid a lot of allocation by embedding structs, passing interior pointers, etc. Compared to Java or C#, it can have a much smaller number of allocations as a result.
> Specifically the sections about value-oriented programming are exactly that: Go allows the developer to avoid a lot of allocation by embedding structs, passing interior pointers, etc.
To elaborate, for example, indirect calls cause parameters to those calls to be judged escaping and unconditionally allocated on the heap. Go style encourages frequent use of interfaces such as io.Reader. So in order to interoperate with common Go code, such as that of the standard library, you will be allocating a lot.
> Compared to Java or C#, it can have a much smaller number of allocations as a result.
C# also allows you to embed structs within other structs and pass interior pointers. Java HotSpot has escape analysis as well, though it's less important for that JVM (and other JVMs), since HotSpot has a generational GC with fast bump allocation in the nursery.
As I've mentioned before, I also have a problem with the conclusion of this talk: that generational garbage collection isn't the right thing for Go. The problem is that nobody has tested generational GC with the biggest practical benefit of it: bump allocation in the nursery. I'm not surprised that generational GC is a loss without that benefit.
> avoid a lot of allocation by embedding structs, passing interior pointers, etc
I can create a struct and take a ref to an interior field of that struct in C#, can I not? And if I wanted to badly enough, I could use unsafe code and take a pointer to the third byte of an interior field of that struct.
Maybe you mean something different by "control over allocation"? Go does allow that, for example "The Journey of Go's Garbage Collector" talk has a good summary,
https://blog.golang.org/ismmkeynote
Specifically the sections about value-oriented programming are exactly that: Go allows the developer to avoid a lot of allocation by embedding structs, passing interior pointers, etc. Compared to Java or C#, it can have a much smaller number of allocations as a result.