Thanks. I know there's a `go vet` tool that's run as part of Kubernetes CI, and one of its checks is:
lostcancel: check cancel func returned by context.WithCancel is called
The cancel function escapes the function body, so static analysis can't detect it. There's another lint for that (containedctx), but I think it's off in K8s.
This is a serious tripping point with Go. There's no way to express: "this is a root context that I _want_ to store and only use to create derived contexts". Goroutines are also a source of problems, you can't easily say "I'm passing the ownership of this context to a goroutine".
It does seem like a serious tripping point.
I took a quick look at "containedctx" and it seems like for this case, it would almost be backwards: it would flag the (not-memory-leaking) struct-stored "status.ctx", but wouldn't flag when there is a stored "status.cancelFn" only (which resulted in the memory leak).
Could Go implement a runtime leaked-context detector, like the data race detector? https://go.dev/doc/articles/race_detector
This actually is possible now. Contexts are now garbage-collectible, even if cancel() is not called.
In this case, the cancel() function was preventing the collection. But I think it can be changed to hold a weak reference instead. The overhead is too large to run it normally, but it should be OK for something like the race detector.
[flagged]