Well, like I said, I've never seen anyone claim Go as pass-by-reference. That having been said, the spec refers to slices and maps as "reference types" but it doesn't mean they're pass by reference. They're still passed as a pointer, you just don't see it.

You're correct about the "ref" keyword in C#, when used for the arg and parameter, it causes the function or method to act on the same chuck of memory as the alias represented in the caller.