Getting to Go: The Journey of Go's Garbage Collector - The Go Programming Language
This is the transcript from the keynote I gave at the International Symposium on Memory Management (ISMM) on June 18, 2018. For the past 25 years ISMM has been the premier venue for publishing memory management and garbage collection papers and it was an honor to have been invited to give the keynote.
The Go language features, goals, and use cases have forced us to rethink the entire garbage collection stack and have led us to a surprising place. The journey has been exhilarating. This talk describes our journey. It is a journey motivated by open source and Google’s production demands. Included are side hikes into dead end box canyons where numbers guided us home. This talk will provide insight into the how and the why of our journey, where we are in 2018, and Go’s preparation for the next part of the journey.
Richard L. Hudson (Rick) is best known for his work in memory management including the invention of the Train, Sapphire, and Mississippi Delta algorithms as well as GC stack maps which enabled garbage collection in statically typed languages such as Modula-3, Java, C#, and Go. Rick is currently a member of Google’s Go team where he is working on Go’s garbage collection and runtime issues.
