Today, with indivisible compound objects, Go can keep a simple map from memory addresses to the block of memory that they keep alive and the garbage collector doesn’t have to care about the type of a pointer, just its address, because the address alone is what determines how much memory is kept alive. In a world where compound objects are divisible, we must somehow arrange for &b.smallThing and &b to be treated differently by the garbage collector, either by giving the garbage collector access to type information or by having them point to different addresses.