Reference-Semantics

Structs with methods look like classes, but the hardware tells a different story. Go makes contiguous values + static calls the path of least resistance. In inheritance-heavy C++ designs, you often end up with pointers + virtual dispatch + scattered memory. This isn’t syntax - it’s what the CPU executes.

OOP’s implicit reference semantics were manageable in single-threaded code. But when CPUs went multicore in 2005, hidden shared state went from ‘confusing’ to ‘catastrophic.’ This is why Go and Rust refined OOP: keeping methods and encapsulation while replacing inheritance with composition and implicit references with value semantics.