Since objects with short lifetimes account for a large
portion of storage use, it is worth optimizing a garbage
collector to reclaim storage for these objects
more quickly.
I'd be interesting to know to what degree Go's aggressive stack-based allocation/escaping makes this hypothesis less strong than other languages.
For example, Java a few generations ago was very poor at escaping heap allocation to the stack and so much the opposite skewing towards heap allocation over stack allocation, so I'm sure the JVMs of this era were an extremely good fit for the generational hypothesis.
1983: A Real-Time Garbage Collector Based on the Lifetimes of Objects, Lieberman/Hewitt
http://web.media.mit.edu/~lieber/Lieberary/GC/Realtime/Realt...