Go has a lot of lower level internal implementations of things that unsafe code like this serves as a thin shim for. It’s an almost zero-cost abstraction to use such a builtin.

I’m not saying it’s good: it just is what it is. It’s silly: but so is most of go. I’ve worked with this language for several years now: I don’t like it at all. It presents a facade of simplicity, but has all sorts of hidden issues that affect performance and behavior in surprising ways.