It is intended to be absolutely safe: dereferencing an invalid pointer doesn't result in "undefined behavior" -- it results in your program halting every time.

It is intended to be absolutely safe: dereferencing an invalid pointer doesn't result in "undefined behavior" -- it results in your program halting every time. You can't accidentally succeed or allow for buffer overflows, which is all that's important (especially since Go doesn't have exceptions). Hopefully they can rip off the design of GHC's amazing parallel garbage collector (it runs in its own pthread), and ditch the current mark-and-sweep.