Introduction # In the world of systems programming, memory management is the ultimate trade-off. Go (Golang) became famous because it abstracted this complexity away from us. The Go Runtime’s Garbage Collector (GC) is a marvel of engineering—it is concurrent, tri-color, and, as of 2025, incredibly efficient with sub-millisecond pause times for most workloads.
Introduction # If you have been writing Go for any length of time, you likely know the “magic” of the language: put the keyword go in front of a function, and it runs concurrently. It feels almost free. You can spawn 100,000 goroutines on a standard laptop, and the program just hums along. Try doing that with Java threads or OS pthreads, and your machine will likely grind to a halt before you hit 10,000.
If you have been writing Go for a few years, you likely appreciate its simplicity. You don’t have to manually malloc or free memory like in C, nor do you have to wrestle with the complex borrow checker of Rust. Go just works.
