What version of Go are you using (go version)?

(master)mwhudson@ringil:/opt/opensource/gopath/src/golang.org/x/tools$ /snap/bin/go version
go version go1.12.9 linux/amd64

but it's similar with 1.11, 1.10 at least.

Does this issue reproduce with the latest release?

yes.

What operating system and processor architecture are you using (go env)?

(master)mwhudson@ringil:/opt/opensource/gopath/src/golang.org/x/tools$ /snap/bin/go env
GOARCH="amd64"
GOBIN=""
GOCACHE="/home/mwhudson/.cache/go-build"
GOEXE=""
GOFLAGS=""
GOHOSTARCH="amd64"
GOHOSTOS="linux"
GOOS="linux"
GOPATH="/opt/opensource/gopath"
GOPROXY=""
GORACE=""
GOROOT="/snap/go/4301"
GOTMPDIR=""
GOTOOLDIR="/snap/go/4301/pkg/tool/linux_amd64"
GCCGO="gccgo"
CC="gcc"
CXX="g++"
CGO_ENABLED="1"
GOMOD=""
CGO_CFLAGS="-g -O2"
CGO_CPPFLAGS=""
CGO_CXXFLAGS="-g -O2"
CGO_FFLAGS="-g -O2"
CGO_LDFLAGS="-g -O2"
PKG_CONFIG="pkg-config"
GOGCCFLAGS="-fPIC -m64 -pthread -fmessage-length=0 -fdebug-prefix-map=/tmp/go-build976150766=/tmp/go-build -gno-record-gcc-switches"

What did you do?

(master)mwhudson@ringil:/opt/opensource/gopath/src/golang.org/x/tools$ /snap/bin/go test -c ./go/internal/gcimporter/
(master)mwhudson@ringil:/opt/opensource/gopath/src/golang.org/x/tools$ /usr/bin/time ./gcimporter.test -test.v -test.run=TestBExportData_stdlib

What did you expect to see?

The test using a reasonable amount of memory.

What did you see instead?

=== RUN   TestBExportData_stdlib
haserrors/haserrors.go:2:22: cannot convert "" (untyped string constant) to untyped int
haserrors/haserrors.go:3:18: undeclared name: undefined
--- PASS: TestBExportData_stdlib (23.56s)
PASS
21.93user 17.20system 0:23.67elapsed 165%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 1263756maxresident)k
30276inputs+1880outputs (109major+593642minor)pagefaults 0swaps

That's a single testcase using about 1.2 GiB of RAM. This causes problems for Ubuntu because we run tests of all packages in VMs which by default have 1GiB of RAM. If the test cannot easily be reduced in footprint, maybe it should be skipped in -short mode?