The Green Tea Garbage Collector
12 comments
·October 29, 2025turtletontine
Wow… this is an excellent article. I’ve always been fascinated by GCs (well, as long as I’ve known what they are), and I just love seeing this kind of technical but accessible explanation of how they work, their bottlenecks, and a great new idea about solving those bottlenecks. This is exactly the kind of article that I hope to see every time I load up hacker news
pizlonator
This is very cool.
I've already been using bitvector SIMD for the sweep portion of mark/sweep. It's neat to see that tracing can be done this way.
VGF2P8AFFINEQB FTW
luafox
the two little slide decks showing each garbage collector in action are simply wonderful, and really help communicate how this improves go's GC situation
matthewmueller
Appreciated the human element paragraph at the end!
boris_m
What's a page?
hedgehog
A (usually) small amount of memory that is the standard size all the memory management hardware and software use. Often 16Kb or 4Kb. If physical memory gets mapped to logical address space, address space marked read only, data swapped in or out, or logical address space gets mapped to other hardware (say GPU memory or a network card's buffer) it's usually done by page.
null
dzonga
what revenue / profitable google services are actually relying on golang ?
parliament32
Kubernetes as a whole is the best example I can think of, given that it's deployed in most modern tech companies and every cloud provider offers a managed service.
null
Acceleration by using the x86 AVX-512 extensions is especially compelling. Since ARM64 processors are becoming pervasive in server-side systems, is-there/will-there-be any optimization using the ARM64 NEON vector instructions in current or future Go versions? (The NEON instructions are 128-bit, instead of 512 bits in the AVX-512 set, but may still be useful.)