1. What version of Go are you using (go version)? go1.6
2. What operating system and processor architecture are you using (go env)? linux/amd64
3. What did you do?

I was helping to debug several unaccounted for allocations and we came across what we thought was very peculiar behavior. Consider the following two implementations of the same package

http://play.golang.org/p/hC-b5VSG58
http://play.golang.org/p/soCMGF1WjG

And the following benchmark

http://play.golang.org/p/e37ObBxwJP

1. What did you expect to see?

Neither implementation appears to allocate anything in the Foo function. So I expect go test -bench to report zero allocations for both implementations of the package.

1. What did you see instead?

For the first example (hC-b5VSG58) the command go test -bench=. -benchmem reports two allocations (48 bytes total) when the C function is passed a non-nil argument.

$ go test -bench=. -benchmem
testing: warning: no tests to run
PASS
BenchmarkFoo-4           5000000               317 ns/op              48 B/op          2 allocs/op
BenchmarkFoo_nil-4      10000000               164 ns/op               0 B/op          0 allocs/op
ok      github.com/bmatsuo/lmdb-go/tmp/cgo-allocs       3.718s

The second example avoids any allocation.

$ go test -bench=. -benchmem
testing: warning: no tests to run
PASS
BenchmarkFoo-4          10000000               151 ns/op               0 B/op          0 allocs/op
BenchmarkFoo_nil-4      10000000               151 ns/op               0 B/op          0 allocs/op
ok      github.com/bmatsuo/lmdb-go/tmp/cgo-allocs       3.345s

The first example does see a performance impact, I assume because of the allocations.