> When I read the article it was very clear, due to the compiler's in-memory graphs, that they needed a GC.
It's actually pretty easy to do something like this with C, just using something like an arena allocator, or honestly, leaking memory. I actually wrote a little allocator yesterday that just dumps memory into a linkedlist, it's not very complicated: http://github.com/danieltuveson/dsalloc/
You allocate wherever you want, and when you're done with the big messy memory graph, you throw it all out at once.
There are obviously a lot of other reasons to choose go over C, though (easier to learn, nicer tooling, memory safety, etc).
(IE, as opposed to reference counting, where if you have cyclic loops, you need to manually go in and "break" the loop so memory gets reclaimed.)