About Go Optimizations 101

This book provides some code performance optimization tricks, tips, and suggestions. Most of the contents in this book are made based on the official standard Go compiler and runtime implementation.

Life is full of trade-offs, the programming world is, too. In programming, we often need to make trade-offs between code readability, maintainability, development efficiency, and program efficiency, etc. Even for one of the aspects, there are also trade-offs needing to be made. Taking program efficiency for an example, we might need to make trade-offs between memory saving, code execution speed, and implementation difficulty, etc.

In practice, most parts of the code base of a project don't need to be implemented with high performances. Keeping them maintainable and readable is often more important (than making them memory saving and run very fast). The suggestions made in this book are just for the code parts which implementations really need to be high performant. Some of the suggestions often lead to more verbose code. And please note that some of the suggested implementations might be only performant at some certain scenarios.

The contents in this book include:

• how to consume less CPU resources.
• how to consume less memory.
• how to make less memory allocations.
• how to control memory allocation places.
• how to reduce garbage collection pressure.

This book neither explains how to use performance analysis tools, such as pprof, nor tries to study deeply on compiler and runtime implementation details. The books also doesn't introduce how to use profile-guided optimization. None of the contents provided in this book make use of unsafe pointers and cgo. And the book doesn't talk about algorithms. In other words, this book tries to provide some optimization suggestions in a way which is clear and easy to understand, for daily general Go programming.

Without particularly indicated, the code examples provided in this book are tested and run on a notebook with the following environment setup:

go version go1.20 linux/amd64
goos: linux
goarch: amd64
cpu: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-4210U CPU @ 1.70GHz

Some benchmark times information is removed from benchmark results, to keep benchmark lines short.

Please note that:

• some of the talked suggestions in this book work on any platform and for any CPU models, but some others might only work on specified platforms and for specified CPU models. So please benchmark them on the same environments as your production environments before adopting any of them.
• some implementation details of the official standard Go compiler and runtime might change from version to version, which means some of the talked suggestions might not work for future Go toolchain versions.
• the book will be open sourced eventually since a later undetermined time point (about 2023/Jun), in a chapter by chapter way.

About the author

Tapir is the author of this book. He also wrote the Go 101 book. He is planning to write some other Go 101 series books. Please look forward to.

Tapir was ever (maybe will be again) an indie game developer. You can find his games here: tapirgames.com.

Feedback

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