Rick Hudson gave this excellent keynote on some of the "recent" (as of 2018) improvements and guiding principles for Go's GC, if you're interested in the nitty-

Rick Hudson gave this excellent keynote on some of the "recent" (as of 2018) improvements and guiding principles for Go's GC, if you're interested in the nitty-gritty. https://blog.golang.org/ismmkeynote https://blog.golang.org/ismmkeynote He outlines the SLOs for the garbage collector, with the motivation that this SLO impacts the SLOs/time budget of every application built with Go. They key metrics are "share of CPU used for GC", heap sizes, latency and frequency of pauses, and scaling favorably with go-routine allocations.