Hello, dear colleagues! In today's article, I would like to discuss memory management in Go: how to properly allocate memory and what tools the compiler provides us to optimize this process. We will pay special attention to the Escape Analysis mechanism and get familiar with two memory regions - stack and heap. This article will serve as a good guide for both less experienced developers and professionals. Questions about Escape Analysis and memory management come up in almost every interview starting from mid-level positions. And when I conduct interviews - I always ask about it 😉
Before we dive into the details of memory management in Go, it's important to understand the basic principles of memory management in the language. Unlike C++, where the developer has full control over memory management, Go uses automatic memory management and garbage collection. This allows developers to focus on business logic without worrying about manual memory allocation and deallocation.
However, it's important to understand how Go manages memory to write efficient and optimized code. This is especially critical for high-load applications, where efficient memory usage can significantly impact performance. Understanding these mechanisms will also help you avoid potential performance issues and memory leaks.
These two types of memory have different characteristics and purposes that affect program performance and efficiency. Let's look at each of them in detail.
Stack is a memory region that operates on the LIFO (Last In, First Out) principle. This approach makes working with the stack very efficient and predictable. Each new function call creates a new stack frame that contains local variables and parameters of that function.
Each goroutine in Go has its own small stack (initial size usually 2KB). This allows creating a huge number of goroutines without significant memory overhead. Importantly, goroutine stacks can dynamically grow and shrink as needed during execution, unlike fixed thread stacks in many other languages.
Heap is a dynamic memory area used to store objects whose size can change during program execution, or when an object's lifetime extends beyond the function where it was created.