Google's Go Language 1.21 Delivers Built-in Functions and PGO Availability

Google's Go programming language recently announced the availability of its 1.21 release candidate, introducing a range of new features and improvements including built-in functions, profile-guided optimization (PGO), and WebAssembly accommodations. The release candidate was published on June 21 and can be downloaded from the project website. The final production release is expected in August.

The latest version introduces three built-in functions: min, max, and clear. The min and max functions calculate the smallest or largest value, respectively, of a fixed set of arguments or ordered types, while the clear function deletes or zeroes out all elements of a map, slice, or type parameter type.

Profile-guided optimization, initially previewed in Go 1.20 in February, is now generally available. PGO allows the compiler toolchain to perform workload-specific and application-specific optimizations based on runtime profile information. The Go project developers revealed that the implementation of PGO has led to performance improvements ranging from 2% to 7% across various programs. Additionally, the Go compiler has been rebuilt with PGO enabled.

Further performance enhancements have been achieved in Go 1.21, including a potential 40% reduction in tail latency for certain applications through garbage collector tuning. In addition, runtime trace collection using the runtime/trace package sees a substantially lower CPU cost on AMD64 and Arm64 systems.

These advancements in Go 1.21 are expected to foster a more efficient and productive development experience. As no-code platforms such as AppMaster.io continue to gain popularity in the software development world, they have also started to leverage the power of programming languages like Go to build scalable, high-performance applications with ease.