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Comment by DamonHD | Hacker News Reader

AFAIK not nearly enough stuff gets caught by escape analysis - and thus stack allocated - to make a difference.

Go has much more significant stack allocation capabilities, most notably it has no problem allocating entire structs on the stack so doesn't need scalar replacement, which falls over if you breathe on it (https://pkolaczk.github.io/overhead-of-optional/).

According to https://github.com/golang/go/discussions/70257#discussioncom...

> the weak generational hypothesis does not hold up well with respect to heap-allocated memory in many real-world Go programs (think 60-70% young object mortality vs. the 95% typically expected)

Historically, Hotspot's escape analysis only resulted in avoided heap allocations (via scalar replacement) if all uses were inlined. I don't think this has changed.

I'm open to believing that this is true, but some real numbers would be nice. Surely it wouldn't be a hugely invasive change to fork the Go compiler, change the stack allocation check to `return false`, and then measure the overhead of the garbage collector on real Go programs with stack allocation both enabled and disabled.

I may have been answering past you - I am thinking of Java running on the JDK here. And indeed I may be out of date also.

Yeah in Java land specifically I think the question would become, "does the generational hypothesis still hold up once we have Valhalla and a much larger share of short-lived objects are stack allocated as value types?" but of course it may be years until the ecosystem reaches that point, if ever.

As shown by C#, it will generally continue to be relevant since both primarily use JIT compilation with ability to modify code at runtime which can violate inter-procedural escape analysis assumptions leading to heap allocations of the objects that are passed down to the callees (there is work scheduled for .NET 10 to address this, at least for AOT compilation where interproc analysis conclusions will be impossible to violate).

You can craft a workload which violates the hypothesis by only allocating objects that live for a long time but both JVM and .NET GC implementations are still much faster designs than Go's GC which prioritizes small memory footprint and consistent latency on low allocation traffic (though as of .NET 9, SRV GC puts much more priority on this, making similar tradeoffs).

> ability to modify code at runtime

Would Java's moves towards "integrity by default" mean that this could be ruled out in more cases?

Reading through the JEP again it does not seem to be related - it is about deprecating unsafe APIs that the executed code itself uses. OpenJDK also has "partial escape analysis" where the object that only conditionally escapes can still be placed on the stack/scalar replaced.

I'm not privy to the exact APIs that OpenJDK exposes but in .NET the main limitation around escape analysis that spans multiple methods is the fact that CoreCLR has re-JIT API which allows to perform a multitude of actions like attaching a profiler or a debugger to a live application and forcing the runtime to deoptimize a particular method for debugging, or modifying the implementation and re-JITting the result. Debug codegen is very different especially around GC liveness tracking and escape analysis that builds on top of it - it means that even debug code would have to uphold stack-allocated nature of such object in some way, complicating the design significantly. In addition to that, debuggers and other instrumentation may observe object references that would have otherwise not escaped local scope.

This creates an unfortunate situation where the above almost never happens in production, but ignoring it and "just stack-allocating anyway" would lead to disastrous breakage for all sorts of existing instrumentation. Because Go does not have to deal with this constraint, it can perform interproc escape analysis without risk - whether a pointer escapes or not can be statically proven. For NativeAOT, .NET could approach this problem in the same way, but paraphrasing compiler team: "We would like to avoid optimizations only available for one of the target types be it JIT or AOT, and only supporting AOT would not benefit the majority of the .NET users".

There is, however, recognition that more comprehensive interproc analysis could be very beneficial, including the EA which is why it is planned to work on it in .NET 10:

- https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/issues/108931 IPA framework

- https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/issues/104936 Stack allocation enhancements

Yeah there's a JEP around deprecating access to sun.misc.Unsafe, but that's part of a larger effort including Jigsaw to push the Java ecosystem in the direction of modular builds, where more invariants are assumed to hold (e.g. " 'final' fields are actually final") unless explicitly opted out for each module. I would assume the lack of such guarantees in the status quo wreaks a lot of havoc with EA.

Profiling and debugging would be separate considerations -- I'm really not sure what limitations those impose on the JVM JIT.

Integrity by default is what the OpenJDK folks are pushing for so that any API that can break runtime assumptions, has to be explicitly allowed, so that they can actually make use of performance optimizations that would otherwise be too risky if anyone at any time could violate them.

Ahem --- JDK => JVM!

The reason escape analysis is not "good enough" is why we have project Valhalla trying to bring Value Types into the JVM.

I don't have numbers at hand, but I remember the JDK Expert Group talking about this extensively in the past and why they deferred bringing Value Types for such a long time. They hoped complex enough EA can get rid of indirections and heap allocations but it just wasn't powerful enough, even with all advances throughout the years.

Is there a language that makes this explicit, allocates the variables on the stack via compiler enforced notation?

C, C++, Rust, Zig, …

What's Zig's notation for it?

Not doing anything, same as the other 3.

Heap allocation is what requires requesting memory from an allocator.

Right.. been using GC languages to long. Everything allocated to the stack unless it is specifically allocated to the heap. I was stuck thinking about what the keywords were. But I'm still curious.. are there any GC languages that have a way to specify if something should go on the stack or the heap?

> are there any GC languages that have a way to specify if something should go on the stack or the heap?

I think only in the sense that some GCd language have value (stack) types as a separate hierarchy from heap types? E.g. structs in C# or Swift are stack-allocated (and value-identity, and copied) whereas classes are heap-allocated.

Adding that for java is one of the goals of Project Valhalla I believe.

Common Lisp. The dynamic-extent declaration allows for stack allocation.

I'm not sure about Zig, but what strikes me about the others are that they change the type of the object.

T vs T*.

It would be kind of neat if you could have an annotation on the variable instead that didn't change the type.

You could in C++ make a reference T& which is almost that - references behave identically to the real thing. But I think freeing the memory backing a reference is probably quite questionable?

C# (.NET in general) :)

Well, variables cannot be forced to stack specifically. They are placed in the "local scope". And that would usually be either stack or CPU registers - thinking in stack only is a somewhat flawed mental model.

Both C# and F# complicate this by supporting closures, iterator and async methods which capture variables placing them in a state machine box / display class instead which would be located on the heap, unless stack-allocated by escape analysis (unlikely because these usually cross method boundaries).

However, .NET has `ref structs` (or, in F#, [<Struct; IsByRefLike>] types) which are subject to lifetime analysis and can never be placed on the heap directly or otherwise.

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