mmap-go

In go, you can do mmap with some help of external library :) you can mmap a file - https://github.com/edsrzf/mmap-go - and then unsafe-retype that to slice of objects, and then read/write to it. It's very handy sometimes! It's unsafe though. You also need to be careful to not have any pointers in the struct (so also no slices, maps); or if you have pointers, the must be nil. Once you start unsafe-retyping random bytes to pointers, thing explode very quickly. So maybe this article has a point.

Well, I guess it's more that the standard library doesn't have a cross-platform way to access them, not that memory-mapped files themselves can't be done on (say) Windows. It looks like there's a fairly popular 3rd party package that supports at least Linux, macOS, and Windows: https://github.com/edsrzf/mmap-go

> With Go, you never, ever have to write any OS-specific code It actually depends what you want to do. Since Go tends to be low-level, there may be a moment where your code goes into syscall land, in which case you're going to be OS-specific. The most recent example I have in mind is mmaping a file: see https://github.com/edsrzf/mmap-go: there is a windows- and a unix- specific version. If you're using something else, you're out of luck (with this package at least) There is a syscall package, but it's just piling up a lot of syscalls with already some OS-specific stuff. It is going to be so much of a burden to manage that the Go team plans to abstract this in a new package (https://golang.org/s/go1.4-syscall)