And yet it does: https://godbolt.org/z/h9GW5v3YK

And creates an on-stack slice whose size is only limited by Go's 1GB limit on individual stack frames: https://godbolt.org/z/rKzo8jre6 https://godbolt.org/z/don99e9cn

Yea with more context it suddenly makes sense :p

Interesting, [...] syntax works here as expected. So escape analysis simply doesn't look at the element list.