I see, thank you. RE reducing the capacity, I want to distinguish freeing the memory (1) used for the slice and (2) referred to by the slice elements. I can easily see that freeing (1) is hard and not so beneficial, but I can't see why (2) would be difficult, and the benefit seems potentially much larger. In our case, each slice element has a handle to a sizable []byte, so that's why I was interested to know if they would remain live.
As an aside, (1) was addressed by Ian here: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/golang-nuts/sVhjhiYLXNg/YNZ_H-JsBAAJ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "golang-nuts" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to golang-nuts+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/golang-nuts/ef48dc4d-ff17-4648-8fb9-4302f43ff5ae%40googlegroups.com.
