[ryanpetrich]

The bigger problem is mutability. Any pointers into the bit-packed enum storage become invalid as soon as you change its type. To solve this you can either prohibit pointers into bit-packed enum storage, which is very limiting, or introduce immutability into the language. Immutability is particularly difficult to add to go, where default zero-values emerge in unexpected places (such as the spare capacity of slices and the default state of named return values)