Go has been my primary language for a few years now, and I’ve had to do extra work to make sure I’m avoiding the heap maybe five times. Stack and heap aren’t on my mind most of the time when designing and writing Go, even though I have a pretty good understanding of how it works. The same applies to the garbage collector. It just doesn’t matter most of the time.

That said, when it matters it matters a lot. In those times I wish it was more visible in Go code, but I would want it to not get in the way the rest of the time. But I’m ok with the status quo of hunting down my notes on escape analysis every few months and taking a few minutes to get reacquainted.

Side note: I love how you used “from above” and “from below”. It makes me feel angelic as somebody who came from above; even if Java and Ruby hardly seemed like heaven.

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carb 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

Why have you had to avoid the heap? Performance concerns?

	▲	malkia 4 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		For me, avoiding heap, or rather avoiding gc came when I was working (at work) on backend and web server using Java, and there was default rule for our code that if gc takes more than 1% (I don't remember the exact value) then the server gets restarted. Coming (back then) from C/C++ gamedev - I was puzzled, then I understood the mantra - it's better for the process to die fast, instead of being pegged by GC and not answering to the client. Then we started looking what made it use GC so much. I guess it might be similar to Go - in the past I've seen some projects using a "baloon" - to circumvent Go's GC heuristic - e.g. if you blow this dummy baloon that takes half of your memory GC might not kick so much... Something like this... Then again obviously bad solution long term
	▲	ignoramous 4 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Garbage Collection. The content of the stack is (always?) known at compile time; it can also be thrown away wholesale when the function is done, making allocations on the stack relatively cheaper. These FOSDEM talks by Bryan Boreham & Sümer Cip talk about it a bit: - Optimising performance through reducing memory allocations (2018), https://archive.fosdem.org/2018/schedule/event/faster/ - Writing GC-Friendly [Go] code (2025), https://archive.fosdem.org/2025/schedule/event/fosdem-2025-5... Speaking of GC, Go 1.26 will default to a newer one viz. Green Tea: https://go.dev/blog/greenteagc

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tdfirth 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Ha! I had not intended to imply that one is better than the other, but I am glad that it made you feel good :).

I also came "from above".