Comment 1:

On investigation, it is not the test case that is causing the OOM, is is the compiler.
For example, this is 8g
        Command being timed: "/home/dfc/go/pkg/tool/linux_386/8g -o /tmp/go-build178694897/reflect/_test/_go_.8 -p reflect_test -complete -D _/home/dfc/go/src/pkg/reflect -I /tmp/go-build178694897/reflect/_test -I /tmp/go-build178694897 ./all_test.go ./example_test.go ./set_test.go ./tostring_test.go"
        User time (seconds): 7.81
        System time (seconds): 2.01
        Percent of CPU this job got: 99%
        Elapsed (wall clock) time (h:mm:ss or m:ss): 0:09.84
        Average shared text size (kbytes): 0
        Average unshared data size (kbytes): 0
        Average stack size (kbytes): 0
        Average total size (kbytes): 0
        Maximum resident set size (kbytes): 3436544
        Average resident set size (kbytes): 0
        Major (requiring I/O) page faults: 0
        Minor (reclaiming a frame) page faults: 219387
        Voluntary context switches: 21
        Involuntary context switches: 52
        Swaps: 0
        File system inputs: 0
        File system outputs: 282184
        Socket messages sent: 0
        Socket messages received: 0
        Signals delivered: 0
        Page size (bytes): 4096
        Exit status: 0

Comment 2:

It's not only a memory issue. The resulting binary is 21MB large for no reason and the
object file is 73MB large which is ridiculous for such small source code.
There is a deeper issue and fixing it will require changes to both compiler and linker.

Comment 3:

This issue was closed by revision f791012.

Status changed to Fixed.