History

• Created at Google in 2007
• Open source
• Compiled, statically typed language
• Garbage collected

Other points of interest

• No inheritence
• No exceptions

Go 1.0

• Driving motivation was to provide stability for users
• Code that compiles with Go 1 should, with few exceptions, continue to compile and run with future 1.x versions
• Solid standard library
• Capable of cross compiling, e.g. windows exe from linux

Go 1.1

• Primary focus was performance
  • typical improvements about 30%-40%
• Method values, bound functions
• int and uint went from 32 to 64 bits on 64 bit architectures
• Introduced the race detector
• New packages: go/format, net/http/cookiejar, runtime/race

Go 1.2

• Start of a shorter release cycle
• Improvements to internal scheduler, thread handling, and stack size
• Introduces coverage tool as part of 'go test'
• Performance improvements on bzip, crypto/des, and json packages
• New packages: encoding, image/color/palette

Go 1.3

• Faster builds, better garbage collection
  • 50%-70% reduction in collector pause time
  • race detector about 40% faster
• Added support for DragonFly BSD, Solaris, Plan 9, and Google's Native Client architecture (NaCl)
• Changes map iteration order to be not specified
• New packages: debug/plan9obj

Go 1.4

• Most of the C code for the Go runtime (garbage collector, concurrency support, interface management, maps, slices, strings) translated to Go
• Internal packages within the go package, stops packages being imported outside of the source tree
• Added "custom" or "vanity" import path
  • e.g. github.com/rsc/pdf -> rsc.io/pdf
• Added 'go generate' for code generation

Go 1.5

• Compiler and runtime now entirely written in Go (with a little assembler)
• Garbage collector is now concurrent, will run with other goroutines when possible
• Go defaults to now use all the cores on the machine (used to be 1)
• Internal packages now available for any package

Text

GC Pause (ms)

https://twitter.com/brianhatfield/status/634166123605331968

Go 1.6

• Added support for linux/ppc64le, and experimental linux/mips64, linux/mips64le, android/386
• Initial support for shared object libraries
• Support added for vendoring external libraries
• No new packages, but many big fixes

Text

https://twitter.com/brianhatfield/status/692778741567721473

Text

https://twitter.com/brianhatfield/status/767812346760859648

Go 1.7

• Added support for macOS 10.12 Sierra, linux/s390x, and initial plan9/arm. Previous experimental 64-bit MIPS now fully supported
• New code generation for 64-bit x86 systems means reduced CPU time 5%-35%
• Compiler and linker optimisations
• New packages: context, net/http/httptrace

https://dave.cheney.net/2016/04/02/go-1-7-toolchain-improvements

Wall clock compile and link

https://dave.cheney.net/2016/04/02/go-1-7-toolchain-improvements

Wall clock link time

https://dave.cheney.net/2016/04/02/go-1-7-toolchain-improvements

Resulting binary size

Go 1.8

• Most changes are in the implementation of the toolchain, runtime, and libraries
• Struct assignment now ignores tags
• EOL some older OSes, early OS X, ARMv5E ARMv6
• The compiler backend introduced in 1.7 for 64-bit x86 now used for all architectures
• Compiler and linker optimised, about 15% improvement
• Default GOPATH, $HOME/go, %USERPROFILE%/go
• Early support for plugins, only on linux for now

https://dave.cheney.net/2016/11/19/go-1-8-toolchain-improvements

Wall clock compile and link

Text

https://twitter.com/brianhatfield/status/767812346760859648