When I wrote about how Go 1.15 improved converting small integer values to interfaces, I said that Go pointing small integer interface values to its special static array of the first 256 integers was similar to what some dynamic languages do. For example, Python effectively interns a bunch of small integers. However, in one important respect what Go is doing is different from what Python and other languages are doing. In Go, this optimization is invisible to normal, proper Go programs, while the equivalent in other languages often is visible in some situations.

The reason this optimization is visible to programs in Python is that Python exposes the actual unique interned objects for small numbers to you. Since you get access to these objects, you can tell when two numbers from two completely different sources are actually the same object, and sometimes this matters. (And since the unique objects are directly exposed to you, they have to be made immutable.)

Go doesn't do this. Go works in values and values are always copied, including when you create interface values from concrete values (even if the concrete value is a pointer). How an interface value holds its copy of the concrete value is invisible to Go programs. When you create an interface value from a concrete value, the interface value takes a copy of the concrete value and stores it somehow. When you get the concrete value back using a type assertion or call a method on the concrete type through the interface value, Go makes a copy of the concrete value held by the interface value and gives it to you (or the method). You never get a reference to the interface value's copy of the concrete value.

Mechanically, Go implements interface values using a pair of pointers (cf), which means that an interface value normally needs to allocate a place to put its copy of the concrete value (which it will then have a pointer to). But you never get access to the 'pointer to the concrete value' part of the interface value in normal Go and so you can never observe that for a small integer, it's pointing into a static array instead of into the heap. Since you can't see these pointers, you also can't see that two different interface values have pointers to the same entry in the static array.

(You can use the unsafe package to crack open the otherwise opaque interface value and pull out the pair of pointers. But then you're not using normal Go.)