I would note that the JVM has done inter-procedural escape analysis for quite some time (via inlining) and the new Graal compiler does even more advanced inter-procedural escape analysis. In particular JVMs do not do stack allocation, they do something better called scalar replacement, which allows tricks like deleting variables from the middle of an scalar-replaced object. Effectively every field of the non-escaping object become local variables that can then be studied, removed, moved around etc. The talk says that Go doesn't do inter-procedural escape analysis at all.

Escape analysis and value types are both useful techniques, but they don't eliminate the need for a fast GC.

I would actually be quite interested in a study of whether equivalent Go/Java programs allocate more or less, especially when pitted against Graal. Presumably it's not hard to prepare such a test.