Go 1.7 freeze announced

From the article/link:

As noted in past emails to golang-dev and on golang.org/wiki/Go-Release-Cycle, the constraints above are stricter than in past cycles. An explicit goal is to ship the first beta on time, by May 31, instead of many weeks late as has been our past practice. (If the past pattern held, this release's first beta would be seven weeks late, or one week before the scheduled release date.)

Code written that compiles on Go 1.0 should still compile with Go 1.7.

Bump Go, fix bugs that were there but are now exposed by improvements to the runtime/race detectors, carry on with life.

Stability increases, in our case, we just update Go on our CI and we get smaller binaries, better performance as updates come in. The code is always backward compatible so our code always compile. We obviously make sure our test suite passes and don't see any regressions. It was nice to get http/2 for free in a recent update, especially with cloudFlare now supporting http/2 push.

Go 1.x is deemed stable[1].

[1] https://golang.org/doc/go1compat

Others already noted - it's backwards-compatible. But it's actually even a bit easier than that for an all-Go project. On Ubuntu, the easiest way to have go installed is to use gvm ( https://github.com/moovweb/gvm ).

Which means you do something like:

  $ gvm install go1.7
  $ gvm use go1.7
  $ go build myproj
  Errors?  Fix them - and in the meantime, just switch back:
  $ gvm use go1.6
  $ go build myproj

It's impressively painless. I went from go1.4 to 1.6 without having to change a single line of code -- but the 'go vet' tool got better, so when I re-ran it, it pointed out a few things that I then fixed. The compile didn't break without them, notably.

I'll echo what a lot of people are saying, with some caveats. The Go language spec hasn't changed since 1.0 -- that means that, by and large, code written in the days of 1.0 will still compile in 1.6 (and should compile in 1.7).

Of course, reality is often different. We have a very large Go monorepo at work, and we've run into almost every breaking-but-not-spec-changing change in the language since 1.4. We've had subtle changes in behavior cause panics in production, code that used CGO to stop compiling, third party libraries tripping the race detector when GOMAXPROCS=NUMCPU was introduced by default, etc.

The majority of changes/fixes have been pretty small, and I'd say it takes about a day of man-hours every six months to get us on the next release, which is a drop in the bucket.

This looks sweet:

runtime: support symbolic backtrace of C code in a cgo crash (CL 17761)

Now what does that mean? What does Fortran have to do with Go?

| add support for Fortran (CL 19670, CL 4114)