alt Hacker NewsIt's not confusing that this works in Go. (In my opinion).
A straightforward reading of the code suggests that it should do what it does.
The confusion here is a property of C, not of Go. It's a property of C that you need to care about the difference between the stack and the heap, it's not a general fact about programming. I don't think Go is doing anything confusing.
I like Go a lot, but I often wish we could be more explicit about where allocations are. It’s often important for writing performant code, but instead of having semantics we have to check against the stack analyzer which has poor ergonomics and may break at any time.
But yeah, to your point, returning a slice in a GC language is not some exotic thing.