Monday, six months to a tee since the release of Go 1.6, Google has released the eighth version of the Go programming language, version 1.7.
This release of Golang brings some significant changes, such as an updated compiler, the addition of the context package, and hierarchical testing. Google has also ported the language to IBM LinuxOne mainframes. The port for Linux on IBM z Systems is an experimental release in 1.7 and is accompanied by an early Plan 9 port.
While Gos compiler is known to be slow and needs future work, this release of Go begins to bring in significant improvements to the languages compiler. According to Googles benchmarks, the new compiler increases performance by up to 35 percent. Binary size is reportedly reduced by 20-30 percent and compile speeds have noticeably increased in contrast to 1.6.
Read more at The New Stack
