Yes, but it is still better than the Go GC. Both are super conservative (i.e. not moving), precise (i.e ptr overhead), and just mark & sweep (i.e. full heap scans).

But Boehm-Weiser's GC can parallelize marking, and store and restore the sweep phase for lower latencies, i.e. in incremental mode. http://www.hboehm.info/gc/gcdescr.html

Better GC's, Mark & Compact and Copying as used in more mature languages, are still on the horizon for Go. (If you go for larger heaps and more speed). I see it at just 30% done yet. Go controls its ABI, so it can easily use better GC's in the future.

Oops, I mixed up the two phases. Marking is incremental (also in v8), and sweeping is parallelizable.

http://jayconrod.com/posts/55/a-tour-of-v8-garbage-collectio... gives a good overview of good GC techniques, championed in earlier lisps and functional languages.