You can leak memory by leaking goroutines.
If a goroutine is waiting on a channel that nobody else has access to, it lives forever, as does the memory it references.
So, you can pretty easily leak memory without messing with unsafe things.
So, you can pretty easily leak memory without messing with unsafe things.
It is also pretty easy to detect by this (or something better), which might be handy in a big program: http://play.golang.org/p/XmKfgQ4TmS
Sure it is, if you are leaking goroutines you will see an every increasing count, even when your app is idle if the count doesn't return to the proper baseline then you know you have a problem.
If you start a goroutine should should have a plan for terminating it. If you don't have a natural way like the life cycle of handling a request then you need to use channels (defer/close are your friends), waitgroups, condition vars etc. I work on some fairly large Go applications and this hasn't been a pain point.