Profile-Guided Optimization (PGO) in Go: current state and challenges

Profile-Guided Optimization (PGO) is a well-known compiler optimization technique that brings runtime statistics about how an application is executed to the Ahead-of-Time (AoT) compilation model, which is quite recently added to the Go compiler. However, this technique is not widely used nowadays.

In this talk, I want to discuss the current PGO state in the Go ecosystem. During my work on the Awesome PGO project, I gathered a lot of interesting data points and insights about various PGO issues and discussed many related quirks with different stakeholders like end-users, maintainers, and application developers. We will talk about:

• PGO state across Go compilers
• PGO awareness across the Go industry
• PGO tooling issues
• Strengths and weaknesses of PGO modes for different use cases in real-world
• Top blockers for PGO adoption
• And many other things!

I believe that after the talk more people will be aware of PGO, aware of usual PGO blockers, and know more about how to avoid these limitations in practice.

Target audience: performance-oriented Go users and Go compiler engineers