You might be right, but the language certainly isn't designed around not having garbage collection.
i'm not particularly experienced with go, but it does work directly with pointers iirc. all it lacks is an explicit memory free function, i think. is there more to it?
Uh. Citation needed.
You can set the environment variable GOGC=off [1]
There doesn't actually seem to be a way to explicitly free memory though so I doubt this is actually used.
I stand corrected, there doesn't seem to be a way to manually allocate and de-allocate memory. Looks like there is a switch to turn off GC, but it's intended for debugging.