As someone who writes Go code that processes around 100B messages per day (which all need to be parsed and transformed), I can confirm that the author’s position is very much misguided.

And it also completely ignores the fascinating world of “GC-free Java”, which more than a few of the clients I work with use: Java with garbage collection entirely disabled. It’s used in finance a lot.

Is it pretty? No.

Is it effective? Yes.

Regarding Go’s memory arenas, do you need to use memory arenas everywhere ? Absolutely not. Most high performance code has a hot part that’s centered (like the tokenizer example that OP used). You just make that part reuse memory instead of alloc / dealloc and that’s it.