Andrew Gerrand

18 June 2014

Today we are happy to announce the release of Go 1.3. This release comes six months after our last major release and provides better performance, improved tools, support for running Go in new environments, and more. All Go users should upgrade to Go 1.3. You can grab the release from our downloads page and find the full list of improvements and fixes in the release notes. What follows are some highlights.

Godoc, the Go documentation server, now performs static analysis. When enabled with the -analysis flag, analysis results are presented in both the source and package documentation views, making it easier than ever to navigate and understand Go programs. See the documentation for the details.

The gc toolchain now supports the Native Client (NaCl) execution sandbox on the 32- and 64-bit Intel architectures. This permits the safe execution of untrusted code, useful in environments such as the Playground. To set up NaCl on your system see the NativeClient wiki page.

Also included in this release is experimental support for the DragonFly BSD, Plan 9, and Solaris operating systems. To use Go on these systems you must install from source.

Changes to the runtime have improved the performance of Go binaries, with an improved garbage collector, a new "contiguous" goroutine stack management strategy, a faster race detector, and improvements to the regular expression engine.

As part of the general overhaul of the Go linker, the compilers and linkers have been refactored. The instruction selection phase that was part of the linker has been moved to the compiler. This can speed up incremental builds for large projects.

The garbage collector is now precise when examining stacks (collection of the heap has been precise since Go 1.1), meaning that a non-pointer value such as an integer will never be mistaken for a pointer and prevent unused memory from being reclaimed. This change affects code that uses package unsafe; if you have unsafe code you should read the release notes carefully to see if your code needs updating.

We would like to thank the many people who contributed to this release; it would not have been possible without your help.

So, what are you waiting for? Head on over to the downloads page and start hacking.