> Maybe it's just fanciful and impractical, but I'd sort of hoped this would be the kind of decision that Go could take a stand against, in favor of incentivizing openness.
FWIW: This doesn't enable you to do anything you couldn't do before; it just makes it less annoying.
> I just wanted to mention that I found out the other day that the Go garbage collector doesn't free memory.
If you mean `free` as it's used in `C`, then I guess technically, it doesn't `free` memory, but I fail to see the practical difference between that and how it it releases memory back to the OS - which is does.
> So your process will never shrink in memory usage
I think you've been mislead. This statement is observably false.
I find it really creepy too. I think it's now become a part of the culture of both the Atom and VS Code communities. If you bring it up everyine rushes to tell you about how to disable the metrics package while ignoring the other packages that sends data to bugsnag. In the case of VS Code there are instructions to disable it by editing the code which means that when you update, it'll be reverted. At the same time, automatic updates are enabled by default, so it effectively can't be disabled. There are also several popular plugins for both editors that come with analytics on by default with minimal to no mention of this in their descriptions.
FWIW: This doesn't enable you to do anything you couldn't do before; it just makes it less annoying.