This page summarizes the changes between official stable releases of Go. The change log has the full details. To update to a specific release, use: git fetch --tags git checkout goX.Y.Z Release Policy Each major Go release is supported until there are two newer major releases. For example, Go 1.5 was supported until the Go 1.7 release, and Go 1.6 was supported until the Go 1.8 release. We fix crit

The Go Blog More powerful Go execution traces Michael Knyszek 14 March 2024 The runtime/trace package contains a powerful tool for understanding and troubleshooting Go programs. The functionality within allows one to produce a trace of each goroutine’s execution over some time period. With the go tool trace command (or the excellent open source gotraceui tool), one may then visualize and explore t

Johan Brandhorst-Satzkorn, Julien Fabre, Damian Gryski, Evan Phoenix, and Achille Roussel 13 September 2023 Go 1.21 adds a new port targeting the WASI preview 1 syscall API through the new GOOS value wasip1. This port builds on the existing WebAssembly port introduced in Go 1.11. What is WebAssembly? WebAssembly (Wasm) is a binary instruction format originally designed for the web. It represents a

Jonathan Amsterdam 22 August 2023 The new log/slog package in Go 1.21 brings structured logging to the standard library. Structured logs use key-value pairs so they can be parsed, filtered, searched, and analyzed quickly and reliably. For servers, logging is an important way for developers to observe the detailed behavior of the system, and often the first place they go to debug it. Logs therefore

Eli Bendersky, on behalf of the Go team 8 August 2023 Today the Go team is thrilled to release Go 1.21, which you can get by visiting the download page. Go 1.21 is packed with new features and improvements. Here are some of the notable changes; for the full list, refer to the release notes. Tool improvements The Profile Guided Optimization (PGO) feature we announced for preview in 1.20 is now gene

Rob Pike 24 March 2011 Introduction To transmit a data structure across a network or to store it in a file, it must be encoded and then decoded again. There are many encodings available, of course: JSON, XML, Google’s protocol buffers, and more. And now there’s another, provided by Go’s gob package. Why define a new encoding? It’s a lot of work and redundant at that. Why not just use one of the ex

Tips for writing clear, performant, and idiomatic Go code

Andrew Gerrand 23 September 2010 Concurrent programming has its own idioms. A good example is timeouts. Although Go’s channels do not support them directly, they are easy to implement. Say we want to receive from the channel ch, but want to wait at most one second for the value to arrive. We would start by creating a signalling channel and launching a goroutine that sleeps before sending on the ch

Jean de Klerk, Matt T. Proud 24 February 2021 Introduction In many Go APIs, especially modern ones, the first argument to functions and methods is often context.Context. Context provides a means of transmitting deadlines, caller cancellations, and other request-scoped values across API boundaries and between processes. It is often used when a library interacts — directly or transitively — with rem

Tips for writing clear, performant, and idiomatic Go code

Go vulnerability database The Go vulnerability database (https://vuln.go.dev) is a comprehensive source of information about known vulnerabilities in importable packages in public Go modules. Vulnerability data comes from existing sources (such as CVEs and GHSAs) and direct reports from Go package maintainers. This information is then reviewed by the Go security team and added to the database. We

This tutorial introduces the basics of generics in Go. With generics, you can declare and use functions or types that are written to work with any of a set of types provided by calling code. In this tutorial, you’ll declare two simple non-generic functions, then capture the same logic in a single generic function. You’ll progress through the following sections: Create a folder for your code. Add n

Getting Started Installing Go Instructions for downloading and installing Go. Tutorial: Getting started A brief Hello, World tutorial to get started. Learn a bit about Go code, tools, packages, and modules. Tutorial: Create a module A tutorial of short topics introducing functions, error handling, arrays, maps, unit testing, and compiling. Tutorial: Getting started with multi-module workspaces Int

Matt Pearring and Alex Rakoczy 16 August 2021 Today the Go team is thrilled to release Go 1.17, which you can get by visiting the download page. This release brings additional improvements to the compiler, namely a new way of passing function arguments and results. This change has shown about a 5% performance improvement in Go programs and reduction in binary sizes of around 2% for amd64 platforms

Introduction to Go 1.15 The latest Go release, version 1.15, arrives six months after Go 1.14. Most of its changes are in the implementation of the toolchain, runtime, and libraries. As always, the release maintains the Go 1 promise of compatibility. We expect almost all Go programs to continue to compile and run as before. Go 1.15 includes substantial improvements to the linker, improves allocati

Joe Tsai, Damien Neil, and Herbie Ong 2 March 2020 Introduction We are pleased to announce the release of a major revision of the Go API for protocol buffers, Google’s language-neutral data interchange format. Motivations for a new API The first protocol buffer bindings for Go were announced by Rob Pike in March of 2010. Go 1 would not be released for another two years. In the decade since that fi

Introduction to Go 1.14 The latest Go release, version 1.14, arrives six months after Go 1.13. Most of its changes are in the implementation of the toolchain, runtime, and libraries. As always, the release maintains the Go 1 promise of compatibility. We expect almost all Go programs to continue to compile and run as before. Module support in the go command is now ready for production use, and we e

Tips for writing clear, performant, and idiomatic Go code

About Online communities include people from many different backgrounds. The Go contributors are committed to providing a friendly, safe and welcoming environment for all, regardless of gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disabilities, neurodiversity, physical appearance, body size, ethnicity, nationality, race, age, religion, or similar personal characteristics. The first goal of

Introduction to Go 1.5 The latest Go release, version 1.5, is a significant release, including major architectural changes to the implementation. Despite that, we expect almost all Go programs to continue to compile and run as before, because the release still maintains the Go 1 promise of compatibility. The biggest developments in the implementation are: The compiler and runtime are now written e