This past Monday, November 10th, we celebrated the 16th anniversary of Go’s
open source
release!
We released Go 1.24 in February and Go 1.25 in
August, following our now well-established and dependable release
cadence. Continuing our mission to build the most productive language platform
for building production systems, these releases included new APIs for building
robust and reliable software, significant advances in Go’s track record for
building secure software, and some serious under-the-hood improvements.
Meanwhile, no one can ignore the seismic shifts in our industry brought by
generative AI. The Go team is applying its thoughtful and uncompromising mindset
to the problems and opportunities of this dynamic space, working to bring Go’s
production-ready approach to building robust AI integrations, products, agents,
and infrastructure.
First released in Go 1.24 as an experiment and then graduated in Go 1.25, the
new testing/synctest package
significantly simplifies writing tests for concurrent, asynchronous
code. Such code is particularly common in network services,
and is traditionally very hard to test well. The synctest package works by
virtualizing time itself. It takes tests that used to be slow, flaky, or both,
and makes them easy to rewrite into reliable and nearly instantaneous tests,
often with just a couple extra lines of code. It’s also a great example of Go’s
integrated approach to software development: behind an almost trivial API, the
synctest package hides a deep integration with the Go runtime and other parts
of the standard library.
This isn’t the only boost the testing package got over the past year. The new
testing.B.Loop API is both easier to use
than the original testing.B.N API and addresses many of the traditional—and
often invisible!—pitfalls of writing Go benchmarks. The
testing package also has new APIs that make it easy to
cleanup in tests that use
Context, and that make it
easy to write to the test’s log.
Go and containerization grew up together and work great with each other. Go 1.25
launched container-aware scheduling, making
this pairing even stronger. Without developers having to lift a finger, this
transparently adjusts the parallelism of Go workloads running in containers,
preventing CPU throttling that can impact tail latency and improving Go’s
out-of-the-box production-readiness.
Go 1.25’s new flight recorder builds on our already
powerful execution tracer, enabling deep insights into the dynamic behavior of
production systems. While the execution tracer generally collected too much
information to be practical in long-running production services, the flight
recorder is like a little time machine, allowing a service to snapshot recent
events in great detail after something has gone wrong.
Secure software development
Go continues to strengthen its commitment to secure software development, making
significant strides in its native cryptography packages and evolving its
standard library for enhanced safety.
Go ships with a full suite of native cryptography packages in the standard
library, which reached two major milestones over the past year. A security
audit conducted by independent security firm Trail of
Bits yielded excellent
results, with only a single low-severity finding.
Furthermore, through a collaborative effort between the Go Security Team and
Geomys, these packages achieved CAVP certification,
paving the way for full FIPS 140-3 certification. This is a
vital development for Go users in certain regulated environments. FIPS 140
compliance, previously a source of friction due to the need for unsupported
solutions, will now be seamlessly integrated, addressing concerns related to
safety, developer experience, functionality, release velocity, and compliance.
The Go standard library has continued to evolve to be safe by default and
safe by design. For example, the os.Root
API—added in Go 1.24—enables traversal-resistant file system
access, effectively combating a class of vulnerabilities where an
attacker could manipulate programs into accessing files intended to be
inaccessible. Such vulnerabilities are notoriously challenging to address
without underlying platform and operating system support, and the new
os.Root API offers a straightforward,
consistent, and portable solution.
Under-the-hood improvements
In addition to user-visible changes, Go has made significant improvements under
the hood over the past year.
For Go 1.24, we completely redesigned the map
implementation, building on the latest and greatest ideas in
hash table design. This change is completely transparent, and brings significant
improvements to map performance, lower tail latency of map operations, and
in some cases even significant memory wins.
Go 1.25 includes an experimental and significant advancement in Go’s garbage
collector called Green Tea. Green Tea reduces garbage
collection overhead in many applications by at least 10% and sometimes as much
as 40%. It uses a novel algorithm designed for the capabilities and constraints
of today’s hardware and opens up a new design space that we’re eagerly
exploring. For example, in the forthcoming Go 1.26 release, Green Tea will
achieve an additional 10% reduction in garbage collector overhead on hardware
that supports AVX-512 vector instructions—something that would have been nigh
impossible to take advantage of in the old algorithm. Green Tea will be enabled
by default in Go 1.26; users need only upgrade their Go version to benefit.
Go is about far more than the language and standard library. It’s a software
development platform, and over the past year, we’ve also made four regular
releases of the gopls language server, and have formed partnerships to
support emerging new frameworks for agentic applications.
Gopls provides Go support to VS Code and other LSP-powered editors and IDEs.
Every release sees a litany of features and improvements to the experience of
reading and writing Go code (see the v0.17.0,
v0.18.0, v0.19.0, and
v0.20.0 release notes for full details, or our new
gopls feature documentation!). Some highlights include many
new and enhanced analyzers to help developers write more idiomatic and robust Go
code; refactoring support for variable extraction, variable inlining, and JSON
struct tags; and an experimental built-in server for the
Model Context Protocol (MCP) that exposes a subset of gopls’ functionality to AI
assistants in the form of MCP tools.
With gopls v0.18.0, we began exploring automatic code modernizers. As Go
evolves, every release brings new capabilities and new idioms; new and better
ways to do things that Go programmers have been finding other ways to do. Go
stands by its compatibility promise—the old way will continue
to work in perpetuity—but nevertheless this creates a bifurcation between old
idioms and new idioms. Modernizers are static analysis tools that recognize old
idioms and suggest faster, more readable, more secure, more modern
replacements, and do so with push-button reliability. What gofmt did for
stylistic consistency, we hope modernizers can do for idiomatic
consistency. We’ve integrated modernizers as IDE suggestions, where they can
help developers not only maintain more consistent coding standards, but where we
believe they will help developers discover new features and keep up with the
state of the art. We believe modernizers can also help AI coding assistants keep
up with the state of the art and combat their proclivity to reinforce outdated
knowledge of the Go language, APIs, and idioms. The upcoming Go 1.26 release
will include a total overhaul of the long-dormant go fix command to make it
apply the full suite of modernizers in bulk, a return to its pre-Go 1.0
roots.
At the end of September, in collaboration with
Anthropic and the Go community, we released
v1.0.0 of
the official Go SDK for the
Model Context Protocol (MCP). This SDK
supports both MCP clients and MCP servers, and underpins the new MCP
functionality in gopls. Contributing this work in open source helps empower
other areas of the growing open source agentic ecosystem built around Go, such
as the recently released Agent Development Kit (ADK) for
Go from Google.
ADK Go builds on the Go MCP SDK to provide an idiomatic framework for building
modular multi-agent applications and systems. The Go MCP SDK and ADK Go
demonstrate how Go’s unique strengths in concurrency, performance, and
reliability differentiate Go for production AI development and we are expecting
more AI workloads to be written in Go in the coming years.
Go has an exciting year ahead of it.
We’re working on advancing developer productivity through the brand new go fix
command, deeper support for AI coding assistants, and ongoing improvements to
gopls and VS Code Go. General availability of the Green Tea garbage collector,
native support for Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) hardware features,
and runtime and standard library support for writing code that scales even
better to massive multicore hardware will continue to align Go with modern
hardware and improve production efficiency. We’re focusing on Go’s “production
stack” libraries and diagnostics, including a massive (and long in the making)
upgrade to encoding/json, driven by Joe Tsai and people across
the Go community; leaked goroutine
profiling, contributed by
Uber’s Programming Systems team; and many
other improvements to net/http, unicode, and other foundational packages.
We’re working to provide well-lit paths for building with Go and AI, evolving
the language platform with care for the evolving needs of today’s developers,
and building tools and capabilities that help both human developers and AI
assistants and systems alike.
On this 16th anniversary of Go’s open source release, we’re also looking to the
future of the Go open source project itself. From its humble
beginnings, Go has formed a
thriving contributor community. To continue to best meet the needs of our
ever-expanding user base, especially in a time of upheaval in the software
industry, we’re working on ways to better scale Go’s development
processes—without losing sight of Go’s fundamental principles—and more deeply
involve our wonderful contributor community.
Go would not be where it is today without our incredible user and contributor
communities. We wish you all the best in the coming year!
