> It's possible that this is a compiler bug. It's also possible that there's some fringe case where the reference actually can escape via that method call, and

> It's possible that this is a compiler bug. It's also possible that there's some fringe case where the reference actually can escape via that method call, and the compiler doesn't have enough context to rule it out. Here's an example, I think: suppose the method spawns a new goroutine that contains a reference to `chunkStore`. This goroutine can outlive the `ReadBytes` function call, and thus Go has to heap allocate the thing being referenced. In general, this kind of example makes me suspect that Go's escape analysis algorithm treats any method call as a black box and heap allocates anything being passed to it by reference.