A good tip build tends to be more stable then 1.0.3 and has hugely improved performance (most importantly for large application in garbage collection and generation).

To select a suitable tip build we use http://build.golang.org/ and https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/golang-de... . My recommendation would be to find a one or two week old build that passed all checks, do a quick skim of the mailing list to make sure there weren't any other issues and use that revision. Also, you will see some the the builders are broken-

Of course if your application has automated unit tests and load tests, run those too before a full deployment.

Or it could speak poorly of their release process, which is more accurate. The stable release is simply so bad compared to tip that everyone uses tip. There should have been multiple releases since the last stable release so that people could get those improvements without having to run tip.