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Comment by jatone | Hacker News Reader

fundamentally they did, they implemented a generational GC.

The optimizations the JVM does in the newer ones are well understood optimizations but don't address the root issues with implementing generational GC in golang.

the issues was with the write barriers and requirements around moving data which can't be avoided in generational GC implementations because you have to move data and update pointers.

most of the benefits of generational GC doesn't exist in golang because of escape analysis allocating data on the stack.

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ZGC isn't currently generational and still outperforms Go's GC, and the benefits of Java's advanced collectors don't (just) come from their being generational. I agree Go has some difficulty with compaction among other things, but that only means that it will take some time to fix. Important Go workloads perform poorly because of its GC. I don't know what Go has to do to fix its GC, but it's not perfectly fine.

regions have generations. its the same concept just partitioned to make the working sets smaller.

there isn't anything fundamentally wrong with golangs GC. attempting to apply the solutions for the JVM to golang is fundamentally flawed and ignorant.

the languages have fundamentally different approaches to memory allocations. and the reasons behind the JVM implementations simply do not exist in golang.

the new pacer is in the works to attempt addressing many of the edge cases. https://github.com/golang/proposal/blob/master/design/44167-...

you seem to lack fundamental understanding of what the actual issues in the golang runtime are with relation to its GC.

> attempting to apply the solutions for the JVM to golang is fundamentally flawed and ignorant.

I'm not saying that Go should use GCs like Java's. I'm just saying that Go's GC does not work well enough for Go's needs, and that Java's GCs now deliver a better experience. Maybe Go needs something entirely different, but it does need something better than what it has now.

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