I think that, for many applications that need to deal with a large heap written in a GC'd language, sooner or later people realize the GC just isn't a good fit and reinvent manual memory management. This is the same regardless of whether you choose Haskell or Java or Go. Even in Java world you can find plenty of evidence that people find GC + large heap unsatisfactory and resort to alternatives like memory-mapped files or JNI or just moving the data out of the process. Same thing with Go. I wouldn't call it masochism.