alt Hacker NewsI don't understand why they felt necessary to rewrite a core component in another language. If you have a garbage collection problem my first intuition would be to produce less garbage!
For example better using the stack, or pulling out the big gun of manual memory management.
I'm sure they had reasons to choose Go when they first designed this project but they don't go into them at all.
Feels like they just wanted to play with a new toy.
Replies
> produce less garbage!
They explained in the post why this wasn't an issue: they were producing very little garbage, but there was a very large object graph.
> manual memory management
If you need to do manual memory management in a GC language with no builtin support for it, like Go, that's probably a sign that you should switch to a different language.
If you read the link you'll see that they found out go forces a GC every two minutes no matter the amount of garbage.
One of big issue with GC is it need to scan every reachable objects to mark it is reachable. That mean even if your code produce no garbage but have a large amount of long lived object the GC still need to traverse all of those objects every cycle.
> If you have a garbage collection problem my first intuition would be to produce less garbage!
FTA:
“These latency spikes definitely smelled like garbage collection performance impact, but we had written the Go code very efficiently and had very few allocations. We were not creating a lot of garbage.
[…]
the spikes were huge not because of a massive amount of ready-to-free memory, but because the garbage collector needed to scan the entire LRU cache in order to determine if the memory was truly free from references”