With Go 1.8 to be released, runtime.KeepAlive is now necessary to make sure a reference to a foreign object is not garbage collected and finalized before we get a chance to increment its reference count. runtime.KeepAlive was introduced in Go 1.7 which is the minimum version required by gomobile. Change-Id: I32215f96e4f415ff9be7b979dd3677e067b8d201 Reviewed-on: https://go-review.googlesource.com/35954 Reviewed-by: David Crawshaw <crawshaw@golang.org>