This page summarizes the changes between tagged releases of Go. For full details, see the Mercurial change log.
There are two small language changes: the meaning of chan <- chan int is now defined, and functions returning functions do not need to parenthesize the result type. There is one significant implementation change: the compilers can handle multiple packages using the same name in a single binary. In the gc compilers, this comes at the cost of ensuring that you always import a particular package using a consistent import path. In the gccgo compiler, the cost is that you must use the -fgo-prefix flag to pass a unique prefix (like the eventual import path). 5a/6a/8a: avoid use of fixed-size buffers (thanks Dean Prichard) 5g, 6g, 8g: many minor bug fixes bufio: give Writer.WriteString same signature as bytes.Buffer.WriteString. container/list: PushFrontList, PushBackList (thanks Jan Hosang) godoc: trim spaces from search query (thanks Christopher Wedgwood) hash: document that Sum does not change state, fix crypto hashes http: bug fixes, revision of Request/Response (thanks Petar Maymounkov) math: more handling of IEEE 754 special cases (thanks Charles Dorian) misc/dashboard: new build dashboard net: allow UDP broadcast, use /etc/hosts to resolve names (thanks Yves Junqueira, Michael Hoisie) netchan: beginnings of new package for connecting channels across a network os: allow FQDN in Hostname test (thanks Icarus Sparry) reflect: garbage collection bug in Call runtime: demo of Go on raw (emulated) hw in runtime/pchw, performance fix on OS X spec: clarify meaning of chan <- chan int, func() func() int is allowed now, define ... T (not yet implemented) template: can use interface values time: fix for +0000 time zone, more robust tick.Stop. xgb: support for authenticated connections (thanks Firmansyah Adiputra) xml: add Escape (thanks Stephen Weinberg)
This release is mainly bug fixes with a little new code. There are no language changes. build: $GOBIN should no longer be required in $PATH (thanks Devon H. O'Dell), new package target "make bench" to run benchmarks 8g: faster float -> uint64 conversion (thanks Evan Shaw) 5g, 6g, 8g: clean opnames.h to avoid stale errors (thanks Yongjian Xu), a handful of small compiler fixes 5g, 6g, 8g, 5l, 6l, 8l: ignore $GOARCH, which is implied by name of tool 6prof: support for writing input files for google-perftools's pprof asn1: fix a few structure-handling bugs cgo: many bug fixes (thanks Devon H. O'Dell) codereview: repeated "hg mail" sends "please take another look" gob: reserve ids for future expansion godoc: distinguish HTML generation from plain text HTML escaping (thanks Roger Peppe) gofmt: minor bug fixes, removed -oldprinter flag http: add CanonicalPath (thanks Ivan Krasin), avoid header duplication in Response.Write, correctly escape/unescape URL sections io: new interface ReadByter json: better error, pointer handling in Marshal (thanks Ivan Krasin) libmach: disassembly of FUCOMI, etc (thanks Evan Shaw) math: special cases for most functions and 386 hardware Sqrt (thanks Charles Dorian) misc/dashboard: beginning of a build dashboard at godashboard.appspot.com. misc/emacs: handling of new semicolon rules (thanks Austin Clements), empty buffer bug fix (thanks Kevin Ballard) misc/kate: highlighting improvements (tahnks Evan Shaw) os/signal: add signal names: signal.SIGHUP, etc (thanks David Symonds) runtime: preliminary Windows support (thanks Hector Chu), preemption polling to reduce garbage collector pauses scanner: new lightweight scanner package template: bug fix involving spaces before a delimited block test/bench: updated timings time: new Format, Parse functions
This release is mainly bug fixes. There are no language changes. 6prof: now works on 386 8a, 8l: add FCOMI, FCOMIP, FUCOMI, and FUCOMIP (thanks Evan Shaw) big: fix ProbablyPrime on small numbers container/vector: faster []-based implementation (thanks Jan Mercl) crypto/tls: extensions and Next Protocol Negotiation gob: one encoding bug fix, one decoding bug fix image/jpeg: support for RST markers image/png: support for transparent paletted images misc/xcode: improved support (thanks Ken Friedenbach) net: return nil Conn on error from Dial (thanks Roger Peppe) regexp: add Regexp.NumSubexp (thanks Peter Froehlich) syscall: add Nanosleep on FreeBSD (thanks Devon H. O'Dell) template: can use map in .repeated section There is now a public road map, in the repository and online at http://golang.org/doc/devel/roadmap.html.
Since the last release there has been one large syntactic change to
the language, already discussed extensively on this list: semicolons
are now implied between statement-ending tokens and newline characters.
See http://groups.google.com/group/golang-nuts/t/5ee32b588d10f2e9 for
details.
By default, gofmt now parses and prints the new lighter weight syntax.
To convert programs written in the old syntax, you can use:
gofmt -oldparser -w *.go
Since everything was being reformatted anyway, we took the opportunity to
change the way gofmt does alignment. Now gofmt uses tabs at the start
of a line for basic code alignment, but it uses spaces for alignment of
interior columns. Thus, in an editor with a fixed-width font, you can
choose your own tab size to change the indentation, and no matter what
tab size you choose, columns will be aligned properly.
In addition to the syntax and formatting changes, there have been many
smaller fixes and updates:
6g,8g,5g: many bug fixes, better registerization,
build process fix involving mkbuiltin (thanks Yongjian Xu),
method expressions for concrete types
8l: support for Windows PE files (thanks Hector Chu)
bytes: more efficient Buffer handling
bytes, strings: new function Fields (thanks Andrey Mirtchovski)
cgo: handling of enums (thanks Moriyoshi Koizumi),
handling of structs with bit fields, multiple files (thanks Devon H. O'Dell),
installation of .so to non-standard locations
crypto/sha256: new package for SHA 256 (thanks Andy Davis)
encoding/binary: support for slices of fixed-size values (thanks Maxim Ushakov)
exp/vector: experimental alternate vector representation (thanks Jan Mercl)
fmt: %p for chan, map, slice types
gob: a couple more bug fixes
http: support for basic authentication (thanks Ivan Krasin)
image/jpeg: basic JPEG decoder
math: correct handling of Inf and NaN in Pow (thanks Charles Dorian)
misc/bash: completion file for bash (thanks Alex Ray)
os/signal: support for handling Unix signals (thanks David Symonds)
rand: Zipf-distributed random values (thanks William Josephson)
syscall: correct error return bug on 32-bit machines (thanks Christopher Wedgwood)
syslog: new package for writing to Unix syslog daemon (thanks Yves Junqueira)
template: will automatically invoke niladic methods
time: new ISO8601 format generator (thanks Ben Olive)
xgb: converted generator to new syntax (thanks Tor Andersson)
xml: better mapping of tag names to Go identifiers (thanks Kei Son),
better handling of unexpected EOF (thanks Arvindh Rajesh Tamilmani)
Since the last release there are two changes to the language:
* new builtin copy(dst, src) copies n = min(len(dst), len(src))
elements to dst from src and returns n. It works correctly
even if dst and src overlap. bytes.Copy is gone.
Convert your programs using:
gofmt -w -r 'bytes.Copy(d, s) -> copy(d, s)' *.go
* new syntax x[lo:] is shorthand for x[lo:len(x)].
Convert your programs using:
gofmt -w -r 'a[b:len(a)] -> a[b:]' *.go
In addition, there have been many smaller fixes and updates:
* 6g/8g/5g: many bug fixes
* 8g: fix 386 floating point stack bug (thanks Charles Dorian)
* all.bash: now works even when $GOROOT has spaces (thanks Sergio Luis O. B. Correia),
starting to make build work with mingw (thanks Hector Chu),
FreeBSD support (thanks Devon O'Dell)
* big: much faster on 386.
* bytes: new function IndexByte, implemented in assembly
new function Runes (thanks Peter Froehlich),
performance tuning in bytes.Buffer.
* codereview: various bugs fixed
* container/vector: New is gone; just declare a Vector instead.
call Resize to set len and cap.
* cgo: many bug fixes (thanks Eden Li)
* crypto: added MD4 (thanks Chris Lennert),
added XTEA (thanks Adrian O'Grady).
* crypto/tls: basic client
* exp/iterable: new functions (thanks Michael Elkins)
* exp/nacl: native client tree builds again
* fmt: preliminary performance tuning
* go/ast: more powerful Visitor (thanks Roger Peppe)
* gob: a few bug fixes
* gofmt: better handling of standard input, error reporting (thanks Fazlul Shahriar)
new -r flag for rewriting programs
* gotest: support for Benchmark functions (thanks Trevor Strohman)
* io: ReadFile, WriteFile, ReadDir now in separate package io/ioutil.
* json: new Marshal function (thanks Michael Hoisie),
better white space handling (thanks Andrew Skiba),
decoding into native data structures (thanks Sergey Gromov),
handling of nil interface values (thanks Ross Light).
* math: correct handling of sin/cos of large angles
* net: better handling of Close (thanks Devon O'Dell and Christopher Wedgwood)
support for UDP broadcast (thanks Jonathan Wills),
support for empty packets
* rand: top-level functions now safe to call from multiple goroutines
(thanks Roger Peppe).
* regexp: a few easy optimizations
* rpc: better error handling, a few bug fixes
* runtime: better signal handling on OS X, malloc fixes,
global channel lock is gone.
* sync: RWMutex now allows concurrent readers (thanks Péter Szabó)
* template: can use maps as data (thanks James Meneghello)
* unicode: updated to Unicode 5.2.
* websocket: new package (thanks Fumitoshi Ukai)
* xgb: preliminary X Go Bindings (thanks Tor Andersson)
* xml: fixed crash (thanks Vish Subramanian)
* misc: bbedit config (thanks Anthony Starks),
kate config (thanks Evan Shaw)