[GuB-42]

A GC only deallocates unreferenced memory, if you keep unused references, that's a leak the GC won't catch, as it has no way to know that you won't need it later.

It can happen when your variables have too long a lifespan, or when you have a cache where the entries are not properly evicted.

[foldr]

But how would Valgrind know more than the GC? Of course a program in a GCed language can leak memory, but it’s not clear to me how Valgrind would detect the kinds of memory leaks that you can create in pure Go code (without calling into C or using unsafe functions to allocate memory directly).

[GuB-42]

Valgrind can tell you what is still in use when the program exits, along with useful information, like where it comes from. You can then assess to situation and see if it is normal or not.

In addition, Valgrind is actually a complete toolsuite, not just a memory leak detector. Among these tools is "massif", a memory profiler, so you will have a graph of memory use over time and it can tell you from where these allocations come from.

Not, if your language is fully GCed you can have a debug GC that does the job more efficiently than Valgrind on this task, but I don't know if it is the case for Go.

[foldr]

Pprof should cover most of that for pure Go code, though.