Bryan Boreham (Grafana Labs) and Jordan Lewis (Cockroach Labs) join Mat and Jon to talk about memory management in Go. We learn about the heap, the stack, and the garbage collector. There are also some absolute gems of wisdom scattered throughout this episode, don’t miss it.

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Featuring:

• Bryan Boreham – X
• Jordan Lewis – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
• Mat Ryer – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
• Jon Calhoun – Website, GitHub, X

Show Notes:

Local meet-up shout-at

Miriah Peterson (captainnobody1 on Twitter) says hello on behalf of the Utah Go User Group, as well as Women Who Go Utah.

Some things mentioned on the show

• Statsviz gives you an instant live visualization of your Go application runtime statistics (GC, MemStats, etc.) in the browser
• sync.Pool helps you reduce allocations by keeping objects around when they might otherwise be garbage collected
• From the Go blog: The Journey of Go’s Garbage Collector

Viewcore

The viewcore tool is a command-line tool for exploring the state of a Go process that has dumped core.

Jordan says:

It’s complicated because it still doesn’t work out of the box, you need my branch which isn’t merged:

• https://github.com/jordanlewis/debug/tree/fix-bugs… (my branch)
• https://github.com/golang/debug/tree/master/cmd/viewcore… (the upstream)
• https://go-review.googlesource.com/c/debug/+/321736… (the CL that isn’t merged yet)

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!