| # Go 1.1 is released |
| 13 May 2013 |
| Tags: release |
| Summary: It is our great pleasure to announce the release of Go 1.1. |
| |
| Andrew Gerrand |
| |
| ## |
| |
| It is our great pleasure to announce the release of Go 1.1. |
| |
| .image go-11-is-released_gopherbiplane5.jpg |
| |
| In March last year we released Go 1.0, and since then we have released three |
| minor "point releases". |
| The point releases were made to fix only critical issues, |
| so the Go 1.0.3 you use today is still, in essence, |
| the Go 1.0 we released in March 2012. |
| |
| Go 1.1 includes many improvements over 1.0. |
| |
| The most significant improvements are performance-related. |
| We have made optimizations in the compiler and linker, |
| garbage collector, goroutine scheduler, map implementation, |
| and parts of the standard library. |
| It is likely that your Go code will run noticeably faster when built with Go 1.1. |
| |
| There are some minor changes to the language itself, |
| two of which are worth singling out here: |
| the [changes to return requirements](https://golang.org/doc/go1.1#return) will |
| lead to more succinct and correct programs, |
| and the introduction of [method values](https://golang.org/doc/go1.1#method_values) provides |
| an expressive way to bind a method to its receiver as a function value. |
| |
| Concurrent programming is safer in Go 1.1 with the addition of a race |
| detector for finding memory synchronization errors in your programs. |
| We will discuss the race detector more in an upcoming article, |
| but for now [the manual](https://golang.org/doc/articles/race_detector.html) is |
| a great place to get started. |
| |
| The tools and standard library have been improved and expanded. |
| You can read the full story in the [release notes](https://golang.org/doc/go1.1). |
| |
| As per our [compatibility guidelines](https://golang.org/doc/go1compat.html), |
| Go 1.1 remains compatible with Go 1.0 and we recommend all Go users upgrade to the new release. |
| |
| All this would not have been possible without the help of our contributors from |
| the open source community. |
| Since Go 1.0, the core received more than 2600 commits from 161 people outside Google. |
| Thank you everyone for your time and effort. |
| In particular, we would like to thank Shenghou Ma, |
| Rémy Oudompheng, Dave Cheney, Mikio Hara, |
| Alex Brainman, Jan Ziak, and Daniel Morsing for their outstanding contributions. |
| |
| To grab the new release, follow the usual [installation instructions](https://golang.org/doc/install). Happy hacking! |
| |
| _Thanks to Renée French for the gopher!_ |
