Last Monday, November 10, we celebrated the 16th anniversary of the open source release of Go!
We released Go 1.24 in February and Go 1.25 in August, following our now well-established and reliable 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 advancements in Go’s track record for building secure software, and some serious under-the-hood improvements. In the meantime, one cannot ignore the seismic changes brought about by generic AI in our industry. The Go team is applying its thoughtful and uncompromising mindset to the problems and opportunities of this dynamic space, and working to bring Go’s production-ready approach to building stronger AI integrations, products, agents, and infrastructure.
First released as an experiment in Go 1.24 and then graduated to the new Go 1.25. testing/synctest The package greatly simplifies writing tests for concurrent, asynchronous code. Such code is especially common in network services, and is traditionally very difficult to test well. synctest The package works by virtualizing time itself. It takes tests that used to be slow, flaky, or both, and makes it easy to rewrite them into reliable and nearly instantaneous tests, often with only a few extra lines of code. It’s also a great example of Go’s integrated approach to software development: off the back of an almost trivial API.
synctest The package hides a deep integration with other parts of the Go runtime and standard library.
This is not the only boost testing Received the package last year. New
testing.B.Loop Using the API is easier than the original testing.B.N Many traditional and often invisible APIs and Go benchmarks are written! Addresses the disadvantages.
testing The package also has new APIs that make it easier to clean up tests that use
ContextAnd this makes it easier to write in the test log.
Go and containerization grew up together and work great with each other. Go 1.25 introduced container-aware scheduling, making this pair even stronger. Without developers having to lift a finger, it 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 deeper insights into the dynamic behavior of production systems. While the execution tracer is generally collected Too much
For information to be practical in long-running production services, the flight recorder is like a miniature time machine, allowing the 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 advances in its native cryptography packages and evolving its standard library for improved security.
Go comes with a full suite of native cryptography packages in the standard library, which reached two major milestones in the last year. A security audit conducted by independent security firm Trail of Bits found excellent results, with only a single low-severity finding. Additionally, through a collaborative effort between the Go Security team and Geomis, these packages achieved CAVP certification, paving the way for full FIPS 140-3 certification. This is an important development for Go users in some 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 security, developer experience, functionality, release velocity, and compliance.
Go standard library development continues secure by default And
Secure by DesignFor example, os.Root
The API—added in Go 1.24—enables traversal-resistant file system access, effectively countering a class of vulnerabilities where an attacker can manipulate a program into accessing files intended to be inaccessible. Addressing such vulnerabilities is extremely challenging without underlying platform and operating system support and new
os.Root The API provides 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 it map
Implementation, building on the latest and greatest ideas in hash table design. This change is completely transparent and brings significant improvements map performance, lower tail latency map Operations, and in some cases even critical memory, are won.
Go 1.25 includes an experimental and important advancement in Go’s garbage collector called Green Tea. Green Tea reduces garbage collection overhead by at least 10% and sometimes as much as 40% in many applications. It uses a new algorithm designed for the capabilities and constraints of today’s hardware and opens up a new design space that we are eagerly exploring. For example, in the upcoming 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 almost impossible to take advantage of in older algorithms. Green Tea will be enabled by default in Go 1.26; Users only need to upgrade their Go version to benefit.
Go is much 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 Gopals language server, and formed partnerships to support emerging new frameworks for agentic applications.
Gopulse provides Go support to VS Code and other LSP-powered editors and IDEs. Each release sees a number 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 check out our new GoPals feature documentation!). Some highlights include several new and advanced analyzers to help developers write more idiosyncratic and robust Go code; Variable extraction, variable inlining, and refactoring support for JSON structure tags; and an experimental built-in server for Model Context Protocol (MCP) that exposes a subset of Gopals’ functionality for AI assistants as an MCP tool.
With Gopals v0.18.0, we started exploring automatic code modernizerAs Go evolves, each release brings new capabilities and new idioms; New and better ways to do things that Go programmers are finding other ways to do, Go lives up to its promise of compatibility – the old way will always work – but it still creates a divide between the old idioms and the new idioms, Modernizers are static analysis tools that recognize outdated idioms and suggest faster, more readable, more secure, more Modern
replacement, and do so with push-button reliability. What gofmt did for stylistic consistency, we hope modernizers can do the same 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 keep AI coding assistants on the cutting edge and counter their tendency to reinforce outdated knowledge of the Go language, APIs, and idioms. The upcoming Go 1.26 release will include a complete overhaul of the long-dormant go fix It was ordered to wholesale implement the full suite of modernizers, 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 Model Context Protocol (MCP). This SDK supports both MCP clients and MCP servers, and underpins new MCP functionality in gopls. Contributing this work to open source helps empower other areas of the growing open source agentic ecosystem around Go, such as Google’s recently released Agent Development Kit (ADK) for Go. The ADK builds on the Go MCP SDK to provide an idiomatic framework for building Go modular multi-agent applications and systems. The Go MCP SDK and Go ADK demonstrate how Go’s unique strengths in concurrency, performance, and reliability differentiate Go for production AI development and we look forward to seeing more AI workloads written in Go in the coming years.
It’s an exciting year for Go.
We’re working on advancing developer productivity through brand new go fix
Deeper support for commands, AI coding assistants, and ongoing improvements to Gopals and VS Code Go. The 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 is even better for massively 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 the massive (and long-running) upgrade encoding/jsonRun by Joe Tsai and people from the Go community; Leaked goroutine profiling, contributed by Uber’s programming systems team; and many other improvements net/http, unicodeAnd other basic packages. We’re working to provide well-lit paths for building with Go and AI, evolving the language platform to meet the growing 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 considering the future of the Go open source project. From its humble beginnings, Go has formed a thriving contributor community. To best meet the needs of our ever-growing user base, especially during a time of turmoil in the software industry, we’re working on ways to better scale Go development processes – without losing sight of the fundamentals of Go – and more deeply engage our amazing contributor community.
Go wouldn’t be where it is today without our incredible user and contributor communities. We wish you all the best in the year ahead!