Yes, that is correct. Anything that allocates on the heap requires GC or it will leak memory. Go doesn’t have formal semantics about what allocates on the heap and what allocates on the stack, but it’s more or less intuitive and the toolchain can tell you where your allocations are so you can optimize them away. If you’re putting effort into minimizing allocations, you can probably even leave the GC on and the pause times will likely be well under 1ms.