[ernst_klim]

>Not sure what you mean by imprecise

It's a rigid term:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracing_garbage_collection#Pre...

perf shows how much time does GC eat, and that's quite a lot. Thus in the majority of benchmarks go lags behind java or on par with it at best.

>there is so much less garbage than in other GC languages

That is not true since strings and interfaces are heap allocated thus the only stack allocated objects are numbers and very simple structs (i.e. which contains only numbers), so you would have a lot of garbage unless you are doing a number crunching, which could be easily optimized by inlining and register allocation anyway.

[weberc2]

> It's a rigid term

Ah, neat! I learned something. :)

You’re mistaken about only numbers and simple structs being stack allocated. All structs are stack allocated unless they escape, regardless of their contents. Further, arrays and constant-sized slices may also be stack allocated. I’m also pretty sure interfaces are only heap allocated if they escape; in other words, if you put a value in an interface and it doesn’t escape, there shouldn’t be an allocation at all.

[ernst_klim]

Both arrays and interfaces are heap allocated. Slice is just a pointer to a heap allocated array.

Structure could be stack allocated, but any of it's fields would not if there is anything but a number.

A trivial example:

https://segment.com/blog/allocation-efficiency-in-high-perfo...

    func main() {
            x := 42
            fmt.Println(x)
    }

    ./main.go:7: x escapes to heap

So a trivial interface cast leads to allocation.

[weberc2]

Looks like you're right about interfaces (full benchmark source code: https://gist.github.com/weberc2/87d2fdc379065a2765d1c9f490ad...)!

    BenchmarkEscapeInterface-4        50000000   33.3 ns/op  8 B/op  1 allocs/op
    BenchmarkEscapeConcreteValue-4    200000000  9.45 ns/op  0 B/op  0 allocs/op
    BenchmarkEscapeConcretePointer-4  100000000  10.0 ns/op  0 B/op  0 allocs/op

But arrays are stack allocated:

    BenchmarkEscapeArray-4  50000000   21.3 ns/op  0 B/op  0 allocs/op

And structs are stack allocated, as are their fields--even fields that are structs, slices, and strings!:

    BenchmarkEscapeStruct-4  100000000  12.8 ns/op  0 B/op  0 allocs/op

The code:

    type Inner struct {
    	Slice  []int
    	String string
    	Int    int
    }
    
    type Struct struct {
    	Int    int
    	String string
    	Nested Inner
    }
    
    func (s Struct) AddThings() int {
    	return s.Int + len(s.String) + len(s.Nested.Slice) + len(s.Nested.String) +
    		s.Nested.Int
    }
    
    func BenchmarkEscapeStruct(b *testing.B) {
    	for i := 0; i < b.N; i++ {
    		s := Struct{
    			Int:    42,
    			String: "Hello",
    			Nested: Inner{
    				Slice:  []int{0, 1, 2},
    				String: "World!",
    				Int:    42,
    			},
    		}
    		_ = s.AddThings()
    	}
    }

[ernst_klim]

I'm sure your strings are not stack allocated, they are statically allocated (and would be statically alocated in any language). Not sure about arrays, but dynamic arrays should be dynamically allocated do, your arrays are static probably. They would be heap allocated, if you would use make.

[weberc2]

It doesn't matter whether they're stack allocated or statically allocated; neither is garbage, contrary to the original claim ("Go generates a lot of garbage except when dealing with numeric code"). The subsequent supporting claims ("structs with non-numeric members are heap-allocated", "struct fields that are not numbers are heap allocated", etc) were false (sometimes non-numeric members are heap allocated, but they're often not allocated and never because they're non-numeric and their container is never heap allocated on the basis of the location of the member data).

I think this matter is sufficiently resolved. Go trades GC throughput for latency and it doesn't need compaction to get good cache properties because it generates much less garbage than traditional GC-based language implementations.

[ernst_klim]

>It doesn't matter whether they're stack allocated or statically allocated

It does. Any language could do static allocation, go is not different from java here, the problem is that in any real code nearly all your strings and arrays would be dynamic, thus heap allocated, as well as interfaces. Consider also that allocations in Go are much more expensive than in java or haskell.