Mastering Go - Second Edition

Garbage collection

Garbage collection is the process of freeing up memory space that is not being used. In other words, the garbage collector sees which objects are out of scope and cannot be referenced anymore, and frees the memory space they consume. This process happens in a concurrent way while a Go program is running and not before or after the execution of the program. The documentation of the Go garbage collector implementation states the following:

"The GC runs concurrently with mutator threads, is type accurate (also known as precise), allows multiple GC threads to run in parallel. It is a concurrent mark and sweep that uses a write barrier. It is non-generational and non-compacting. Allocation is done using size segregated per P ...