It definitely can lead to hard to find bugs. I even made an issue out of one case where it could happen in very unexpected ways (which is now fixed on the go ma

It definitely can lead to hard to find bugs. I even made an issue out of one case where it could happen in very unexpected ways (which is now fixed on the go master branch): https://github.com/golang/go/issues/21149 https://github.com/golang/go/issues/21149 Apart from the issue above I've found that it's usually quite easy to reason about though. Usually when you take a slice you either use it temporarily without modifying or you throw away the original one. In the rare case where you do still need both slices to outlive the same function you just copy one of them manually defensively.