| # Seven years of Go | |
| 10 Nov 2016 | |
| Summary: Happy 7th birthday, Go! | |
| The Go Team | |
| rsc@golang.org | |
| ## | |
| <img src="7years/gopherbelly300.jpg" align="right"> | |
| Today marks seven years since we open-sourced our preliminary sketch of Go. | |
| With the help of the open source community, including more than a thousand | |
| individual contributors to the Go source repositories, | |
| Go has matured into a language used all over the world. | |
| The most significant user-facing changes to Go over the past year are the | |
| addition of built-in support for | |
| [HTTP/2](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FARQMJndUn0#t=0m0s) in | |
| [Go 1.6](https://golang.org/doc/go1.6) and the integration of the | |
| [context package](https://blog.golang.org/context) into the standard library in [Go 1.7](https://golang.org/doc/go1.7). | |
| But we’ve been making many less visible improvements. | |
| Go 1.7 changed the x86-64 compiler to use a new SSA-based back end, | |
| improving the performance of most Go programs by 10–20%. | |
| For Go 1.8, planned for release next February, | |
| we have changed the compilers for the other architectures to use the new back end too. | |
| We’ve also added new ports, to Android on 32-bit x86, Linux on 64-bit MIPS, | |
| and Linux on IBM z Systems. | |
| And we’ve developed new garbage-collection techniques that reduce typical | |
| “stop the world” pauses to [under 100 microseconds](https://golang.org/design/17503-eliminate-rescan). | |
| (Contrast that with Go 1.5’s big news of [10 milliseconds or less](https://blog.golang.org/go15gc).) | |
| This year kicked off with a global Go hackathon, | |
| the [Gopher Gala](https://blog.golang.org/gophergala), in January. | |
| Then there were [Go conferences](https://golang.org/wiki/Conferences) in India and Dubai in February, | |
| China and Japan in April, San Francisco in May, Denver in July, | |
| London in August, Paris last month, and Brazil this past weekend. | |
| And GothamGo in New York is next week. | |
| This year also saw more than 30 new [Go user groups](https://golang.org/wiki/GoUserGroups), | |
| eight new [Women Who Go](http://www.womenwhogo.org/) chapters, | |
| and four [GoBridge](https://golangbridge.org/) workshops around the world. | |
| We continue to be overwhelmed by and grateful for | |
| the enthusiasm and support of the Go community. | |
| Whether you participate by contributing changes, reporting bugs, | |
| sharing your expertise in design discussions, writing blog posts or books, | |
| running meetups, helping others learn or improve, | |
| open sourcing Go packages you wrote, or just being part of the Go community, | |
| the Go team thanks you for your help, your time, and your energy. | |
| Go would not be the success it is today without you. | |
| Thank you, and here’s to another year of fun and success with Go! |