This function previously returned the atomic time, that isn't affected
by system time changes but also has a time base at some arbitrary time
in the past. This makes sense for baremetal platforms (which typically
don't know the wall time) but it gives surprising results on Linux and
macOS: time.Now() usually returns a time somewhere near the start of
1970.
This commit fixes this by obtaining both time values: the monotonic time
and the wall clock time. This is also how the Go runtime implements the
time.now function.
This commit does two things:
1. It makes it possible to grow the heap on Linux and MacOS by
allocating 1GB of virtual memory on startup and then slowly using it
as necessary, when running out of available heap space.
2. It switches the default GC to be the conservative GC (previously
extalloc). This is good for consistency with other platforms that
all use this same GC.
This makes the extalloc GC unused by default.
Ayke van Laethem