Evidence of this memory explosion? Keep in mind that Go processes tend to take significantly less memory than Java processes, especially when dealing with IO related code, i.e. sockets (http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u64q/benchmark.php?test=al...).

Sure, if you do it stupidly, and have a highlighter process per open document or something, it could add up over time. But if you share highlighter processes between documents, you have 1 process that you keep open for the lifetime of the application. A simple HTTP server in Go takes < 5 MB of RAM in its steady state, a server using domain sockets would probably be comparable. And even better, a bug in the highlighter doesn't mean your main application crashes. If it crashes, the parent merely restarts the process. Even better, its more secure, in the sense that you can run your highlighter with absolutely no OS privileges. Also, this allows for plugins written in any language that supports sockets.

All I'm saying is that there's no evidence that IPC isn't performant enough. And IPC comes with security, compatibility, and isolation advantages, to boot.

Note that I'm definitely not saying that dynamic loading wouldn't be nice. Do I miss it, when working with Go? Not for my use cases. "Plugins" for servers don't really make sense. But dismissing Go because it doesn't target every use-case at the moment is somewhat shortsighted.