Go Language Performance Improvements: Shifting Memory Allocations from Heap to Stack
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Summary
The article discusses recent efforts by the Go programming language team to improve performance by shifting more memory allocations from the heap to the stack. Heap allocations are slower and create additional load on the garbage collector, even with recent improvements. The team has been working on compiler optimizations to enable more stack allocations, which are faster and reduce garbage collection overhead. The article explains the technical differences between stack and heap allocations and describes specific changes made in recent Go releases to optimize memory allocation patterns.
Key quotes
· 4 pulledWe're always looking for ways to make Go programs faster. In the last 2 releases, we have concentrated on mitigating a particular source of slowness, heap allocations.
Each time a Go program allocates memory from the heap, there's a fairly large chunk of code that needs to run to satisfy that allocation. In addition, heap allocations present additional load on the garbage collector.
Even with recent enhancements like Green Tea, the garbage collector still incurs substantial overhead.
So we've been working on ways to do more allocations on the stack instead of the heap. Stack allocations are...
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