Hacker News Reader

Normaly thats right but you can pass pointers on a channel you share mutible state.

Listen to the go talk at Emergin Languages Camp. Rich Hickey asks about that in the end.

Is there any point where you would want to pass a pointer but NOT because you want mutable state, simply because it's more efficient or something?

Well, pointers have fixed size, random structures may be arbitrarily big and involve a crapload of copying.