Go 1.9 is released and has some new features, including:
- Type aliases
- New math/bits package for bit manipulation in unsigned integers
- New Map type in the sync package
For the IBM POWER architecture, the new minimum requirement for big endian is now POWER8. This unifies hardware requirements for both little endian and big endian and will make it easier to us to provide new features and optimizations for both.
In addition, we have many performance optimizations, including:
- POWER8 performance optimizations for the math/big, strings and bytes packages
- Compiler optimizations in the SSA backend for better instruction sequence generation
- POWER8 performance optimization for AES
For more information about the go 1.9 release, please check the release notes.