The issue is actually impossible to fix without overhauling the entire language. It's impossible to garbage collect unboxed objects without being conservative.
I must be wrong though: it seems Google is using it for parts of their infrastructure, and im assuming those are long running procceses. But what if the worst case scenario does happen? Are there workarounds? Monitor memory usage, and just restart? Can we force the runtime to free a certain resource?
What am i missing? How does this not completely destroy anu utility of these languages? Why do people put conservative gc in languages outside of the esoteric or academic context?
No more so than with C++. There is a relatively high probability of you having left a memory leak in an average C++ server.
> Monitor memory usage, and just restart?
That would work, and is probably a good idea for all servers anyways. I've seen apache take upwards of 60 gigs due to some misconfiguration, so monitoring memory utilization of your programs and alerting or automatically restarting is a good idea.
> What am i missing? How does this not completely destroy anu utility of these languages? Why do people put conservative gc in languages outside of the esoteric or academic context?
There isn't really a good reason as far as I can tell. The only advantages are that its much simpler to implement, particularly when you have C interop. You can annotate Go objects with types to do precise collection, but as soon as you pass them to C, a lot of guarantees the Go typesystem makes go out the window. Other than that, can't think of anything.