Memory Management in Go: The good, the bad and the ugly
summary
Explains that Go uses a concurrent mark‑and‑sweep GC that does stop‑the‑world pauses at mark phases, that goroutine stacks start at 2–4KB and can grow, and that common leaks come from never‑ending goroutines or unclosed DB connections (use defer). Shows concrete tooling: run pprof via net/http, read heap profiles and flame graphs, find functions repeatedly allocating, and preallocate slices to avoid reallocations. Demonstrates fixing a pointer‑swap bug with GitHub Copilot and validates it runs.
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chapters (12)
- 0:00Introduction to memory
- 1:25Key concepts and foundations
- 3:38Understanding memory structure
- 6:34Manual vs automatic management
- 9:07The stack and heap in Go
- 12:31Memory visualization and cleanup
- 14:12Pointers and references
- 18:12Managing memory leaks
- 19:33Optimization and tradeoffs
- 21:57Profiling tools for Go
- 25:17Using AI for debugging
- 28:58Conclusion and takeaways
