These variants uses an unsafe.Pointer instead of uintptr so that the
pointer/non-pointer fields match those of real slices and strings. This
may be necessary in the future once we switch to a precise garbage
collector.
Linked lists are usually implemented as follows:
type linkedList struct {
next *linkedList
data int // whatever
}
This caused a stack overflow while writing out the reflect run-time type
information. This has now been fixed by splitting the allocation of a
named type number from setting the underlying type in the sidetable.
With this change, it becomes possible to get the element type of named
slices, pointers, and channels.
This is a prerequisite to enable the common named struct types. There's
more to come.