[RVuRnvbM2e]

> There's also no way to shrink the memory underlying a slice.

Sorry, that is incorrect: https://pkg.go.dev/slices#Clip

> It's a common newbie mistake to think they do work like that, and write "append(s, ...)" instead of "s = append(s, ...)". It might even randomly work a lot of the time.

"append(s, ...)" without the assignment doesn't even compile. So your entire post seems like a strawman?

https://go.dev/play/p/icdOMl8A9ja

> So (generalizing) Go won't implement a feature that makes mistakes harder, if it makes the language more complicated

No, I think it is more that the compromise of complicating the language that is always made when adding features is carefully weighed in Go. Less so in other languages.

[knorker]

Does clipping make the rest eligible for GC?

Clipping doesn't seem to automatically move the data, so while it does mean appending will reallocate, it doesn't actually shrink the underlying array, right?

[wrs]

Yes, my example was garbled. Thanks @masklinn for correcting it for me below!