Escape analysis, like any such analysis, gets much more difficult in the presence of higher-order control flow. Currently the Go compilers punt on higher order control flow analysis. And Go uses higher-order control flow in spades, due to its heavy reliance on interfaces.

The end result is that lots of stuff is heap allocated.

> Java where everything is a pointer and gets spread out all over memory.

That's not true for Java. Its generational garbage collector performs bump allocation in the nursery, yielding tightly packed objects with excellent cache behavior. Allocation in HotSpot is like 3-5 instructions (really!)

I think the HotSpot approach makes the most sense: instead of trying to carve out special cases that fall down regularly, focus on making heap allocations fast, as you'll need to make them fast anyway. After that, add things like escape analysis (which HotSpot has as well).