Evolution of Garbage Collection in Go: From Mark‑Sweep to Hybrid Write Barriers
This article explains how Go's garbage collection has progressed from the simple stop‑the‑world mark‑and‑sweep algorithm in Go 1.3, through the tri‑color concurrent marking with insert and delete write barriers in Go 1.5, to the hybrid write‑barrier approach introduced in Go 1.8 that dramatically reduces pause times while preserving memory safety.