Go: Building Web Applications

Memory preservation

At the time of this writing, Go 1.2.2's compiler utilizes a naive mark/sweep garbage collector, which assigns a reference rank to objects and clears them when they are no longer in use. This is noteworthy only to point out that it is widely considered a relatively poor garbage collection system.

So why does Go use it? As Go has evolved; language features and compiler speed have largely taken precedence over garbage collection. While it's a long-term development timeline for Go, for the time being, this is where we are. The tradeoff is a good one, though: as you well know by now, compiling Go code is light years faster than, say, compiling C or C++ code. Good enough for now is a fair description for the GC. But there are some ...