[pjmlp]

The knobs are the values that can be given to GOGC environment variable.

Also I kind of foresee they will discover there are reasons why multiple GC algorithms are desired, and used in other programming ecosystems, thus the older one might stay anyway.

[cafxx]

Your previous message was referring to Go "getting" knobs, but GOGC has always been there.

The older GC algorithm won't stay, IIRC the plan is for it to be removed in 1.27 (it's kept for now just to give a fallback in case of bugs in the first release).

[pjmlp]

GOGC was introduced in Go 1.5, and I thought the problem was solved.

https://go.dev/blog/go15gc

> Go 1.5’s GC ushers in a future where stop-the-world pauses are no longer a barrier to moving to a safe and secure language. It is a future where applications scale effortlessly along with hardware and as hardware becomes more powerful the GC will not be an impediment to better, more scalable software. It’s a good place to be for the next decade and beyond.

[cafxx]

> GOGC was introduced in Go 1.5

yes, that's quite literally what I meant by "GOGC has always been there". 1.5 was released 10 years ago, just 3 years after 1.0.

So to summarize: there is one knob (that has been there from basically the beginning), plus a second one (if you squint hard enough: GOMAXMEM), and absolutely no plans to add further ones, or to add alternative GCs.

[pjmlp]

That would be since Go exists, literally.

[cafxx]

The point is that no-one is thinking to add knobs, or allow alternative GCs.