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Another big downside to pools is that a lot of GC implementations will scan only 'live'objects. Large object pools unnaturally increase the number of objects that need to be scanned during GC, negating a (sometimes) useful GC efficiency tick.

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Precisely. This is an especially important point in response to the oft-repeated "just use pools if you want to avoid the GC in a GC'd language" fallacy.

If your GC is triggered after the allocated memory increases by X% (which is fairly common), then this technique is effective, since it lowers allocation rate.

Also, Go doesn't scan arrays that are marked as containing no pointers, so representing an index as a massive array of values has proven quite effective for me.

I was talking about pools as a standalone memory management technique, not a supplement to GC.

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