Sep 01, 2021·1 min read

Go 1.17 Production Release: Simplified Coding for Safety and Performance Improvements

The latest production release of Google's open-source programming language Go 1.17 introduces language and compiler enhancements to improve safety and performance. New features include a more efficient method of passing function arguments using registers and simplified coding for safe pointer operations.

Go 1.17, the most recent update of Google's open-source programming language, has been released to provide improvements in both safety and performance. This production release features language and compiler enhancements that focus on streamlining coding for safety while delivering a more performant method of passing function arguments.

The official release notes highlight three small modifications to the language, with two of them aiming to make it easier to write code that complies with unsafe.Pointer's safety rules. The three enhancements include:

In addition to these language enhancements, Go 1.17 also introduces a new compiler technique for passing function arguments and results using registers rather than the stack. This change has been enabled for Linux, MacOS, and Windows on the 64-bit x86 architecture. According to benchmark tests, this update results in a performance improvement of approximately 5% and a typical reduction in binary size of around 2%. Importantly, this alteration does not affect the functionality of safe Go code. Furthermore, the compiler now allows functions containing closures to be inlined, which may lead to distinct closure code pointer functions for each place the function is inlined.

Another key feature of Go 1.17 is the introduction of pruned module graphs. Module graphs of modules specifying Go 1.17 or higher in their go.mod file will only include the immediate dependencies of other Go 1.17 modules, rather than their full transitive dependencies.

Developers can download Go 1.17 from golang.org. The previous version, Go 1.16, was released in February and brought library and runtime enhancements. The current stable releases include Go 1.16.5 and Go 1.15.13. A future release of the language is set to include a fuzzing capability for Go developers. Go 1.17 entered the beta release stage on June 10th.

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