Do you need to work around Go's escape analysis much? I was under the impression that it's good but not perfect, leading to some heap allocation of variables that wouldn't necessarily need it if they were on C/C++.
The "write a little bit of code, then test it to see if it allocates" approach has been very useful. That way I don't get too far out on a limb with a bunch of allocating code and no easy way to clean things up.