Google today released a new version 1.20 for the programming language Go, which will remove support for older Microsoft Windows and Apple macOS systems, and add a lot of new features/functionality worthy of attention.
The two most notable improvements in Go 1.20 include initial support for Profile Boot Optimization (PGO) versions and support for CPU architecture features such as x86_64 microarchitecture version Flag.
Go 1.20 major updates.
- Go 1.20 is the last version that supports Microsoft Windows 7 / 8 / Server 2008 / Server 2012. Starting from Go 1.21, users need to run on Windows 10 or Windows Server 2016 and higher.
- Go 1.20 also drops support for macOS 10.13 and 10.14 series.
- Experimental support for FreeBSD on RISC-V has been introduced.
- The $GOROOT / pkg directory no longer stores precompiled package archives for the standard archive, allowing for a reduction in the size of Go distributions.
- The go command can now define architecture feature flags such as AMD64.V2 to allow package implementation files to be selected based on the presence or absence of a specific CPU architecture feature. This is good news for workers at the x86_64 microarchitecture feature level.
- go build and go install and other build-related commands now support the “-cover” flag for enabling builds with code coverage detection.
- Optimized garbage collector to reduce memory footprint and improve CPU performance by up to 2%.
- Preview support for Profile Guided Optimizations (PGO).
- On Linux, the linker can choose a dynamic interpreter for glibc or musl.
- Introduced new crypto / ecdh packages to provide explicit support for NIST curves and elliptic curve Diffie-Hellman key exchange on Curve25519.
