| # Go 1.1 is released | |
| 13 May 2013 | |
| Tags: release | |
| Summary: Go 1.1 is faster, less picky about return statements, and adds method expressions. | |
| OldURL: /go-11-is-released | |
| Andrew Gerrand | |
| ## | |
| It is our great pleasure to announce the release of Go 1.1. | |
| .image go1.1/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!_ |