Go's slices don't act like what I thought were called "non-owning references"(Rust's &/&mut [T] or C++'s std::span<T/T const>), which reference memory whose lifetime is bounded by something else (like a vector or array or shared pointer). Instead it's "shared ownership" where memory is referenced by one or more slices (and no single owner) which can reference and mutate the slice simultaneously, and it's freed by the GC sometime after all the slices are gone.

This reminds me of Numpy's ndarrays, which act more like "owning containers" (which may sometimes share ownership and alias) than "non-owning references".