> The goal of the Go 1.5 (June 2015) Garbage Collector (GC) is to reduce GC latency, making Go acceptable for implementing a broad spectrum of systems requiring

> The goal of the Go 1.5 (June 2015) Garbage Collector (GC) is to reduce GC latency, making Go acceptable for implementing a broad spectrum of systems requiring low response times. Quantitatively this means that for adequately provisioned machines limiting GC latency to less than 10 milliseconds (10ms), with mutator (Go application code) availability of more than 40 ms out of every 50 ms. Hardware provisioning should allow for in-memory heap sizes twice as large as reachable memory and 25% of CPU cycles, typically one out of 4 hardware threads, available for GC tasks. These goals align with a future with ever-increasing numbers of hardware threads and an ever-increasing amount of memory, all within an ever-decreasing power and expense budget. >Tactically, we will use a hybrid stop the world (STW) / concurrent garbage collector (CGC). The STW piece will limit the amount of time goroutines are stopped to less than 10 milliseconds out of every 50 milliseconds. If the GC completes a cycle in this time frame, great. If not, the GC will transition into a concurrent GC for the remainder of the 50 millisecond block. This process will repeat until the GC cycle completes. As a practical matter if one has a 50 millisecond response quality of service (QOS) requirement one should expect to have 40 milliseconds in which to do mutator tasks. These numbers assume hardware equivalent to a generic $1000 desktop box running Linux. Source: http://llvm.cc/t/go-1-4-garbage-collection-plan-and-roadmap-golang-org/33 http://llvm.cc/t/go-1-4-garbage-collection-plan-and-roadmap-... It appears the answer to your question is no. My interpretation of the above is that, like other garbage collectors (Haskell's comes to mind, I don't know much about other GCs), some garbage collection will be able to happen concurrently with no pausing, but some collection will still require "stop the world" pauses. Go's goal to limit those stop the world pauses to 10 ms is not something I have seen in many other garbage collectors. The only other garbage collector I've encountered with a similar feature is Nim's garbage collector which claims to allow a limit on how long each garage collection pass will take, similar to what Go is trying to do. I wonder if Go want this 10 ms limit to be a hard or soft limit? * Take all I say about garbage collectors with a grain of salt. I have had some interest in their various features, but am no expert.