Go 1.8 was released yesterday. This release includes some significant changes, including:
- SSA backend enabled in all architectures
- Improvements on garbage collection pause latency
- HTTP/2 Push support
- Continued addition of Contexts support
For the Power architecture, this is the first release in which the assembler is fully VMX/VSX enabled, which will allow us to further improve performance in the runtime packages and create more efficient code sequences in the SSA backend. In addition, there are new performance optimizations (mostly added by new SSA rules), runtime hardware capability/processor detection enabled, and bug fixes.
In the next release, we plan to continue improving performance on Power. Also, there is a discussion about bringing the minimum processor support for big endian ppc64 to POWER8 in Go 1.9. This would allow users running on big endian to get the same benefits of the work we have been doing for little endian.
For more information, please see the Go 1.8 release notes.
* Gopher image by Renee French, licensed under Creative Commons 3.0 Attributions license.