Go 1.17 is Launched

We are stepping into the Go 1.17 era just six months after the release of Go 1.16. The new version was no delay, but no big surprises either. After downloading this latest version and testing some of the new features of my most interest, I want to share them with you in no time. Besides, I will also mention some underlying changes that I think are worth noticing.

Download

As usual, we can either download the pkg installation package (Mac) directly and finish the installation with one click or install from the source. I choose to download the tar file directly and set the IDE Go environment to the decompressed go directory, for I still can’t default Go to 1.17.

$ curl -L https://golang.org/dl/go1.17.darwin-amd64.tar.gz -o go1.17.tar.gz
$ tar -xvf go1.17.tar.gz

By the way, the latest Go version of brew is still 1.16, so brew
is not an option for upgrading.

New Features

As a general Go user, I focus mainly on three changes.

• Language itself, whether there are new syntaxes or language sugar, is often the most interesting part.
• Library. I follow closely the changes to the library, added APIs, the influence on the migration to the new version, and whether these changes will…