Inside Go — How It Really Works: Series Kickoff | Furkan Kolcu

Today I’m kicking off a new series: Inside Go — How It Really Works. The goal is simple — to explore Go from its core internals to the code we write every day. We’ll move step by step through the compiler, runtime, concurrency model, and memory management, building a complete mental model of how Go actually works under the hood.

This isn’t about surface-level syntax tips — it’s about going deep enough that writing efficient, reliable Go code feels natural and confident.

Here’s the roadmap:

Part 1: The Compilation Pipeline

From .go source files to binaries, covering lexing, parsing, SSA, and optimizations.

Inside Go — Part 1: The Compilation Pipeline

Part 2: Memory Management in Go

Stack vs heap, escape analysis, and how Go’s memory allocator works.

Part 3: Garbage Collection (GC)

Go’s garbage collector evolution, tri-color marking, write barriers, and tuning with GOGC.

Part 4: Concurrency — Goroutines and Scheduler

How Go schedules thousands of goroutines using the M:N model (G, M, P).

Part 5: Channels and the CSP Model

Implementation details, usage patterns, and common pitfalls when working with channels.

Part 6: The Go Runtime

What happens before main(), timers, netpoller, and runtime internals.

Part 7: The Standard Library as a Design Statement

How the standard library shapes Go’s idioms and style.

Part 8: Go and Performance Tuning

Profiling, reducing allocations, and practical optimization with real-world examples.

Part 9: Interfaces and Reflection

How interface dispatch works, method tables, and the performance cost of reflection.

Part 10: Generics in Go

How generics are compiled, performance trade-offs, and real-world usage patterns.

Part 11: Go Modules and Reproducible Builds

Module resolution, vendoring, and how Go ensures reproducible builds.

This is going to be a deep technical series — practical, detailed, and focused on what really matters when building with Go. Each part will come with code examples, runtime experiments, and references to official sources so you can connect the dots between theory and practice.