This is probably the thing that annoys me the most about golang: It abstracts everything as if you were on a 1975 computer, so there's allocations, allocations everywhere! And trying to keep them under control requires intimate knowledge about go's implementation details. Failure to do so dooms your program to run 3-4x slower since allocations are horribly slow to begin with, and now your data is spread all over the place. And even then, there are still some things (like []byte <-> string) that you simply can't get around (unless you want to delve into unsafe land and risk your code blowing up once the runtime implementation changes).