The core idea behind the new parallel marking algorithm is simple. Instead of scanning individual objects, the garbage collector scans memory in much larger, contiguous blocks. The shared work queue tracks these coarse blocks instead of individual objects, and the individual objects waiting to be scanned in a block are tracked in that block itself. The core hypothesis is that while a block waits on the queue to be scanned, it will accumulate more objects to be scanned within that block, such that when a block does get dequeued, it’s likely that scanning will be able to scan more than one object in that block. This, in turn, improves locality of memory access, in addition to better amortizing per-scan costs.

source: L

These things mean that despite Go having a GC, it’s possible to do manual memory management in pure Go and in cooperation with the GC (although without any help from the runtime package). To demonstrate this, we will be building an untyped, garbage-collected arena abstraction in Go which relies on several GC implementation details.

source: HN

Go 1.24 is scheduled for release in February, so it’s a good time to explore what’s new. The official release notes are pretty dry, so I prepared an interactive version with lots of examples showing what has changed and what the new behavior is.

source: L

Recently I diagnosed and fixed two frame pointer unwinding crashes in Go. The root causes were two flavors of the same problem: buggy assembly code clobbered a frame pointer. By “clobbered” I mean wrote over the value without saving & restoring it. One bug clobbered the frame pointer register. The other bug clobbered a frame pointer saved on the stack. This post explains the bugs, talks a bit about ABIs and calling conventions, and makes some recommendations for how to avoid the bugs.

source: L

Software shadow stacks could deliver up to 8x faster stack trace capturing in the Go runtime when compared to the frame pointer unwinding that landed in go1.21. This doesn’t mean that this idea should escape from the laboratory right away, but it offers a fun glimpse into a potential future of hardware accelerated stack trace capturing via shadow stacks.

source: HN

wazero is an extremely unique and rare piece of production software out there in the Go ecosystem in the sense that it generates semantically equivalent x86-64 and AArch64 machine code from WebAssembly bytecode at runtime, and then provides the API to execute and interact with it with zero dependency, hence without CGo.

This post is decoupled from wazero itself, and I’ll focus on the general concept of runtime code generation and execution in Go.

source: HN

Computers aren’t random. On the contrary, hardware designers work very hard to make sure computers run every program the same way every time. So when a program does need random numbers, that requires extra effort. Traditionally, computer scientists and programming languages have distinguished between two different kinds of random numbers: statistical and cryptographic randomness. In Go, those are provided by math/rand and crypto/rand, respectively. This post is about how Go 1.22 brings the two closer together, by using a cryptographic random number source in math/rand (as well as math/rand/v2, as mentioned in our previous post). The result is better randomness and far less damage when developers accidentally use math/rand instead of crypto/rand.

source: HN

This article discusses the technical details of static initialization for map data in Go binaries, and some alternative strategies for dealing with the performance impacts.

source: L

This post is best described as a technology demonstration; it melds together web servers, plugins, WebAssembly, Go, Rust and ABIs. Here’s what it shows:

How to load WASM code with WASI in a Go environment and hook it up to a web server.
How to implement web server plugins in any language that can be compiled to WASM.
How to translate Go programs into WASM that uses WASI.
How to translate Rust programs into WASM that uses WASI.
How to write WAT (WebAssembly Text) code that uses WASI to interact with a non-JS environment.

source: L

Go 1.20.2 fixed a small vulnerability in the crypto/elliptic package. The impact was minor, to the point that I don’t think any application was impacted, but the issue was interesting to look at as a near-miss, and to learn from.

source: L

Gotraceui is a tool for visualizing and analyzing Go execution traces. It is meant to be a faster, more accessible, and more powerful alternative to go tool trace. Unlike go tool trace, Gotraceui doesn’t use deprecated browser APIs (or a browser at all), and its UI is tuned specifically to the unique characteristics of Go traces.

source: L

I’m pretty happy with the work that’s landing in it. There are both exciting new APIs, and invisible deep backend improvements that are going to make code more maintainable and secure in the long run. All the main work mentioned in the planning post got done, and then some (but not the “stretch goals”).

crypto/ecdh
bigmod replaces math/big
More elliptic curves
TLS and X.509

There’s no size difference between a string and a struct{ string } and it’s just as easy to read as a straight string. Because of the String() method, you can pass these values to %s etc in format strings and they’ll print out the name with no extra code or work.

source: L

During this time, I’ve been making notes of speed bumps I’ve run into, as well as things I’ve liked about Go. This post is an expanded version of those notes. I’ve tried my best to keep away from abstract examples, and focus on actual things I’ve run into myself.

source: HN

Go 1.18 is here, and with it, the first release of the long-awaited implementation of Generics is finally ready for production usage. Generics are a frequently requested feature that has been highly contentious throughout the Go community. On the one side, vocal detractors worry about the added complexity. They fear the inescapable evolution of Go towards either a verbose and Enterprisey Java-lite with Generic Factories or, most terrifyingly, a degenerate HaskellScript that replaces ifs with Monads. In all fairness, both these fears may be overblown. On the other side, proponents of generics believe that they are a critical feature to implement clean and reusable code at scale.

This blog post does not take sides in that debate, or advise where and when to use Generics in Go. Instead, this blog post is about the third side of the generics conundrum: It’s about systems engineers who are not excited about generics per se, but about monomorphization and its performance implications. There are dozens of us! Dozens! And we’re all due for some serious disappointment.

Very thorough.

source: HN

This post may be a little longer than usual, so grab your coffees, grab your teas and without further ado, let’s dive in and see what we can come up with.

source: L

For a couple hundred lines of code (not counting the entire user-mode Linux you’ll be pulling in from gVisor, HEY! Dependencies! What are you gonna do!) you can bring up a new, cryptographically authenticated network, any time you want to, in practically any program.

There really are some fun libraries out there if you want to build something crazy.

source: HN

The block profile in Go lets you analyze how much time your program spends waiting on the blocking operations listed below:

source: HN

The result of this work is the package go4.org/intern which uses some pretty neat unsafe tricks to implement efficient string interning using weak references and Go finalizers. We’ll start by showing off the safe implementation and gradually introduce the concepts needed to understand the unsafe one as well.

source: L

I didn’t answer this correctly because I focused my attention on the wrong thing.

source: HN