Really? Thats not my understanding, its much smarter than that. Goroutines steal memory from the current pthread machine stack, that is, the machine stack. The problem calling C from a goroutine is that whilst you have a real C stack right there .. other goroutines expect to be able to steal memory from it, and once you call C you don't know how much stack C is going to use. So whilst C is running, goroutines cannot allocate stack memory, which means they cannot call subroutines. The only way to fix that is to give the C function being called its own stack.

The problem you're going to have is that if 10K goroutines all call PCRE you need 10K stacks, because all the calls are (potentially) concurrent.

What makes go work is that the compiler calculates how much local memory a goroutine requires and so after a serialised bump of the stack pointer the routine cannot run out of stack. Serialising the bump between competing goroutines is extremely fast (no locks required). Deallocation is trickier, I think go uses copy collection, i.e. it copies the stack when it runs out of address space on the stack, NOT because its out of memory (the OS can always add to the end), but because the copying compacts the stack by not copying unused blocks. Its a stock standard garbage collection algorithm .. used in a novel way.

The core of Go is very smart. Pity about the rest of the language.