The Latest Version of Go is Released
In August, the Go team
released Go 1.15, marking another milestone of continuous improvements to the language. As always, many of the updates were supported by our community of contributors in collaboration with the engineering team here at Google.
Following our earlier release in February, the latest Go build brings a slew of performance improvements. We’ve made significant changes behind the scenes to the compiler, reducing binary sizes by about 5%, and improving building Go applications to be around 20% faster and requiring 30% less memory on average.
Go 1.15 also includes several updates to the core library, a few security improvements, and much more–you can dive into the full release notes
here. We’re really excited to see how developers like you, ranging from those working on indie projects all the way to enterprise devs, will incorporate these updates into your projects.
A few users have been working with the release candidates ahead of the latest build and were kind enough to share their experience.
Wayne Ashley Berry, a Senior Engineer at
Over, shared that “...seeing significant performance improvements in the new releases is incredible!” and, speaking of compiler improvements,
showed “one of [their] services compiling ~1.3x faster” after upgrading to Go 1.15.
This mirrored our experience within Google, compiling larger Go applications like
Kubernetes which experienced 30% memory reductions and 20% faster builds.
These are just a couple examples of how some users have already seen the benefits of Go 1.15. We’re looking forward to what the rest of the gopher community will do with it!
A Better Experience For Go Developers
Over the last few months we’ve also been hard at work improving a few things in the Go ecosystem. In July, the VS Code extension for Go officially
joined the Go project and more recently, we rolled out a few updates for our online resources.
We brought a few important changes to
pkg.go.dev, a central source of information for Go packages and modules. With these changes came functional improvements to make the browsing experience better and minor tweaks across the site (including a
cute new gopher). We also made some changes to
go.dev—our hub for Go developers—making it easier to navigate the site and find examples of Go’s use in the enterprise.
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| The new home page on pkg.go.dev. Credit to Renee French for the gopher illustration. |
We’ll be bringing even more improvements to the Go ecosystem in the coming months, so stay tuned!
Our Commitment to Open Source and Google Open Source Live
Most of these changes wouldn’t be possible without contribution from our open source community through submitting CLs to our release process, organizing community meetups, and engaging in discussions about future changes (like generics).
Being part of the open source community is something that the Go team embraces, and Google as a whole works to support every year. It’s through this community that we’re able to iterate on our work with a constant feedback loop and bring new gophers into the Go ecosystem. We’re lucky to have the support of passionate Go advocates, and even get to celebrate the occasional community gopher design!
That being said, this has been a challenging year to gather in person for meetups or larger conferences. However, the gopher community has been incredibly resilient, with many meetups taking place virtually, several of which Go team members have been able to attend.
We’d like to help the entire open source community stay connected. In that vein, we’re excited to announce that Google will host a series of free virtual events,
Google Open Source Live, every month through next year! As part of the series, on November 7th, members of the Go team will be sharing community updates, some things we’ve been up to, and a few best practices around getting started with Go.
Visit the official site for the
Go Day on Google Open Source Live, to learn more about registration and speakers. To keep up-to-date with the Go team, make sure to follow the official
Go twitter and visit
go.dev, our hub for Go developers.
By Steve Francia – Product Lead, Go Team
