Profiling Go Programs - go.dev

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2021-09-26 09:30:01

At Scala Days 2011, Robert Hundt presented a paper titled Loop Recognition in C++/Java/Go/Scala. The paper implemented a specific loop finding algorithm, such as you might use in a flow analysis pass of a compiler, in C++, Go, Java, Scala, and then used those programs to draw conclusions about typical performance concerns in these languages. The Go program presented in that paper runs quite slowly, making it an excellent opportunity to demonstrate how to use Go’s profiling tools to take a slow program and make it faster.

By using Go’s profiling tools to identify and correct specific bottlenecks, we can make the Go loop finding program run an order of magnitude faster and use 6x less memory. (Update: Due to recent optimizations of libstdc++ in gcc, the memory reduction is now 3.7x.)

Hundt’s paper does not specify which versions of the C++, Go, Java, and Scala tools he used. In this blog post, we will be using the most recent weekly snapshot of the 6g Go compiler and the version of g++ that ships with the Ubuntu Natty distribution. (We will not be using Java or Scala, because we are not skilled at writing efficient programs in either of those languages, so the comparison would be unfair. Since C++ was the fastest language in the paper, the comparisons here with C++ should suffice.) (Update: In this updated post, we will be using the most recent development snapshot of the Go compiler on amd64 and the most recent version of g++ – 4.8.0, which was released in March 2013.)

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