How Stacks are Handled in Go.

At CloudFlare, We use Go for a variety of services and applications. In this blog post, We're going to take a deep dive into some of the technical intricacies of Go.

One of the more important features of Go is goroutines. They are cheap, cooperatively scheduled threads of execution that are used for a variety of operations, like timeouts, generators and racing multiple backends against each other. To make goroutines suitable for as many tasks as possible, we have to make sure that each goroutine takes up the least amount of memory, but also have people be able to start them up with a minimal amount of configuration.

To achieve this, Go manages stacks in way that behaves like any other language, but is quite different in how they're implemented.

An introduction to thread stacks

Before we look at Go, let's look at how stacks are managed in a traditional language like C.

When you start up a thread in C, the standard library is responsible for allocating a block of memory to be used as that thread's stack. It will allocate this block, tell the kernel where it is and let the kernel handle the execution of the thread. Continue reading