Go: Retrospective

Illustration created for “A Journey With Go”, made from the original Go Gopher, created by Renee French.

The history of Go is must-have knowledge for every developer. Knowing the major changes released across the years helps you to understand the mindset of Go and the strengths/weaknesses of the language for each version. For more details about a specific version, the changelogs are linked to each version number.

Go 1.0 — March 2012:

The first version of Go shipped a compatibility document that guarantees compatibility with the future releases in order to not break existing programs.

This first version already has the go tool pprof command that is a slight variant of Google’s pprof C++ profiler and go vet (previously go tool vet) command that reports likely mistakes in packages.

Go 1.1 — May 2013:

This version of Go was dedicated to improving the language (compiler, garbage collector, map, go scheduler) and its performances. Here is an example of the improvements:

https://dave.cheney.net/2013/05/21/go-11-performance-improvements

This version also embeds the race detector, an essential tool in the language.

You can find more information about race detector in my article “Race Detector with ThreadSanitizer”.