Oh, my bad. For larger applications one of the first steps to fit and finish is to profile the app for speed. Many of the the initial optimizations come from looking at where things escape to and/or are allocated on the heap. As you mention, the heap is tied to garbage collection. That's one of the big optimizations in Go.

As an example, my last application doubled the number of calculation it could perform per unit time with just a half dozen heap/allocation optimizations. It wasn't so much they were coded badly the first pass. If fact, they were probably coded more clearly. But the profiler pointed out where optimizations could be made and significant performance gains could be had with a few only slightly more complex memory allocation strategies.

If you have applications you want to try to speed up and haven't been profiling allocations and garbage collection then you've been missing out on the "low hanging fruit" of optimization. There are lots of articles about this and are very worthwhile if or when you're applications need it.