The Go language features, goals, and use cases have forced us to rethink the entire garbage collection stack and have led us to a surprising place. The journey has been exhilarating. This talk describes our journey. It is a journey motivated by open source and Google’s production demands. Included are side hikes into dead end box canyons where numbers guided us home. This talk will provide insight into the how and why of our journey, where we are in 2018, and Go’s preparation for the next part of the journey.

Richard L. Hudson (Rick) is best known for his work in memory management including the invention of the Train, Sapphire, and Mississippi Delta algorithms as well as GC stack maps which enabled garbage collection in statically typed languages such as Modula-3, Java, C#, and Go. Rick is currently a member of Google’s Go team where he is working on Go’s garbage collection and runtime issues.