Dictionary encoding strings to integers is a common compression technique. In GC'd languages it fakes out the garbage collector because your dictionary codes are essentially pointers but not actually pointers from the GC's perspective. You also have the benefit of potentially using a smaller integer than a pointer if you know roughly the number of values you're encoding beforehand.
Does this hold for Go? The tracing is the only relevant cost and tracing is very, very fast, so I would expect this to be negligible? Or am I misunderstanding the hypothetical scenario?
