Go's Memory Allocator - Overview

Mon, 03 Sep 2018 15:03:34 -0300

I’ve decided to learn how the Go runtime allocates memory and this is the first in a series of posts that are going to cover what I learned (and also the process itself: how I learned). These posts are based of my notes for the talk I gave at Gophercon UK in 2018:

Slides are available here.

In this first post we are going to cover:

Memory allocation 101
How the allocator is invoked
An overview of the tcmalloc algorithm
An overview of the Go’s runtime allocator

The objective of this post is to give a broad idea of how allocation works on the runtime, without actually showing any of it’s code. The following posts on the series will be more dense and with lots of code samples extracted from the runtime. Each of the future posts will cover an specific detail of the allocator.

Go Memory Allocator on andrestc.com

Go's Memory Allocator - Overview