DRAFT RELEASE NOTES - Introduction to Go 1.13

Go 1.13 is not yet released. These are work-in-progress release notes. Go 1.13 is expected to be released in August 2019.

As of Go 1.13, the go command by default downloads and authenticates modules using the Go module mirror and Go checksum database run by Google. See https://proxy.golang.org/privacy for privacy information about these services and the go command documentation for configuration details including how to disable the use of these servers or use different ones.

TODO

Changes to the language

Per the number literal proposal, Go 1.13 supports a more uniform and modernized set of number literal prefixes.

Per the signed shift counts proposal Go 1.13 removes the restriction that a shift count must be unsigned. This change eliminates the need for many artificial uint conversions, solely introduced to satisfy this (now removed) restriction of the << and >> operators.

These language changes were implemented by changes to the compiler, and corresponding internal changes to the library packages go/scanner and text/scanner (number literals), and go/types (signed shift counts).

If your code uses modules and your go.mod files specifies a language version, be sure it is set to at least 1.13 to get access to these language changes. You can do this by editing the go.mod file directly, or you can run go mod edit -go=1.13.

Ports

Android

Go programs are now compatible with Android Q.

Darwin

As announced in the Go 1.12 release notes, Go 1.13 now requires macOS 10.11 El Capitan or later; support for previous versions has been discontinued.

FreeBSD

As announced in the Go 1.12 release notes, Go 1.13 now requires FreeBSD 11.2 or later; support for previous versions has been discontinued. FreeBSD 12.0 or later requires a kernel with the COMPAT_FREEBSD11 option set (this is the default).

Illumos

Go now supports Illumos with GOOS=illumos. The illumos build tag implies the solaris build tag.

AIX

AIX on PPC64 (aix/ppc64) now supports cgo, external linking, and the c-archive and pie build modes.

Windows

The Windows version specified by internally-linked Windows binaries is now Windows 7 rather than NT 4.0. This was already the minimum required version for Go, but can affect the behavior of system calls that have a backwards-compatibility mode. These will now behave as documented. Externally-linked binaries (any program using cgo) have always specified a more recent Windows version.

Tools

TODO

Compiler toolchain

The compiler has a new implementation of escape analysis that is more precise. For most Go code should be an improvement (in other words, more Go variables and expressions allocated on the stack instead of heap). However, this increased precision may also break invalid code that happened to work before (for example, code that violates the unsafe.Pointer safety rules). If you notice any regressions that appear related, the old escape analysis pass can be re-enabled with go build -gcflags=all=-newescape=false. The option to use the old escape analysis will be removed in a future release.

The compiler no longer emits floating point or complex constants to go_asm.h files. These have always been emitted in a form that could not be used as numeric constant in assembly code.

Assembler

The assembler now supports many of the atomic instructions introduced in ARM v8.1.

Runtime

Out of range panic messages now include the index that was out of bounds and the length (or capacity) of the slice. For example, s[3] on a slice of length 1 will panic with "runtime error: index out of range [3] with length 1".

This release improves performance of most uses of defer by 30%.

The runtime is now more aggressive at returning memory to the operating system to make it available to co-tenant applications. Previously, the runtime could retain memory for five or more minutes following a spike in the heap size. It will now begin returning it promptly after the heap shrinks. However, on many OSes, including Linux, the OS itself reclaims memory lazily, so process RSS will not decrease until the system is under memory pressure.

Core library

TODO generally

TLS 1.3

As announced in Go 1.12, Go 1.13 enables support for TLS 1.3 in the crypto/tls package by default. It can be disabled by adding the value tls13=0 to the GODEBUG environment variable. The opt-out will be removed in Go 1.14.

See the Go 1.12 release notes for important compatibility information.

crypto/ed25519

The new crypto/ed25519 package implements the Ed25519 signature scheme. This functionality was previously provided by the golang.org/x/crypto/ed25519 package, which becomes a wrapper for crypto/ed25519 when used with Go 1.13+.

Minor changes to the library

As always, there are various minor changes and updates to the library, made with the Go 1 promise of compatibility in mind.

TODO

bytes

TODO: https://golang.org/cl/161760: hoist error creation out of function

The new ToValidUTF8 function returns a copy of a given byte slice with each run of invalid UTF-8 byte sequences replaced by a given slice.

context

The formatting of contexts returned by WithValue no longer depends on fmt and will not stringify in the same way. Code that depends on the exact previous stringification might be affected.

crypto/tls

Ed25519 certificates are now supported in TLS versions 1.2 and 1.3.

crypto/x509

Ed25519 keys are now supported in certificates and certificate requests according to RFC 8410, as well as by the ParsePKCS8PrivateKey, MarshalPKCS8PrivateKey, and ParsePKIXPublicKey functions.

database/sql

The new NullTime type represents a time.Time that may be null.

The new NullInt32 type represents an int32 that may be null.

debug/dwarf

The Data.Type method no longer panics if it encounters an unknown DWARF tag in the type graph. Instead, it represents that component of the type with an UnsupportedType object.

html/template

When using a <script> tag with "module" set as the type attribute, code will now be interperted as JavaScript module script.

log

The new Writer function returns the output destination for the standard logger.

math/big

TODO: https://golang.org/cl/160682: implement Rat.SetUint64

TODO: https://golang.org/cl/168237: accept non-decimal floats with Rat.SetString

math/bits

The execution time of Add, Sub, Mul, RotateLeft, and ReverseBytes is now guaranteed to be independent of the inputs.

net

On Unix systems where use-vc is set in resolve.conf, TCP is used for DNS resolution.

The new field ListenConfig.KeepAlive specifies the keep-alive period for network connections accepted by the listener.

net/http

The new field Transport.ForceAttemptHTTP2 controls whether HTTP/2 is enabled when a non-zero Dial, DialTLS, or DialContext func or TLSClientConfig is provided.

When reusing HTTP/2, the Transport no longer performs unnecessary TLS handshakes.

TimeoutHandler's ResponseWriter now implements the Pusher and Flusher interfaces.

The new Server fields BaseContext and ConnContext allow finer control over the Context values provided to requests and connections.

The new Header method Clone returns a copy of the receiver.

os

The new UserConfigDir function returns the default directory to use for user-specific configuration data.

If a File is opened using the O_APPEND flag, its WriteAt method will always return an error.

os/exec

On Windows, the environment for a Cmd always inherits the %SYSTEMROOT% value of the parent process unless the Cmd.Env field includes an explicit value for it.

reflect

The new Value.IsZero method reports whether a Value is the zero value for its type.

The MakeFunc function now allows assignment conversions on returned values, instead of requiring exact type match. This is particularly useful when the type being returned is an interface type, but the value actually returned is a concrete value implementing that type.

runtime

Tracebacks, runtime.Caller, and runtime.Callers now refer to the function that initializes the global variables of PKG as PKG.init instead of PKG.init.ializers

strings

The new ToValidUTF8 function returns a copy of a given string with each run of invalid UTF-8 byte sequences replaced by a given string.

sync

Large Pool no longer increase stop-the-world pause times.

Pool no longer needs to be completely repopulated after every GC. It now retains some objects across GCs, as opposed to releasing all objects, reducing load spikes for heavy users of Pool.

syscall

Uses of _getdirentries64 have been removed from Darwin builds, to allow binaries built with 1.12 to be uploaded to the macOS App Store.

The new ProcessAttributes and ThreadAttributes fields in SysProcAttr have been introduced for Windows, exposing security settings when creating new processes.

EINVAL is no longer returned in zero Chmod mode on Windows.

syscall/js

TypedArrayOf has been replaced by CopyBytesToGo and CopyBytesToJS for copying bytes between a byte slice and a Uint8Array.

testing

TODO: https://golang.org/cl/112155: stop rounding b.N

TODO: https://golang.org/cl/166717: add B.ReportMetric for custom benchmark metrics

TODO: https://golang.org/cl/173722: delay flag registration; move to an Init function

text/scanner

The new AllowNumberbars mode allows number literals to contain underbars as digit separators.

text/template

The new slice function returns the result of slicing its first argument by the following arguments.

time

Day-of-year is now supported by Format and Parse.

The new Duration methods Microseconds and Milliseconds return the duration as an integer count of their respectively named units.