Go Turns 17: Generics, JSON v2 and Faster Code Mark Recent Releases
On the language's 17th anniversary, the Go team looked back at Go 1.26 and 1.27, highlighting changes to generics, JSON handling, concurrency diagnostics and performance.
Source: go.dev
The Go team marked the 17th anniversary of the language's open source release on November 10 by reviewing a busy year that included Go 1.26 in February and Go 1.27 in August. The team says it aims to keep Go grounded in simplicity, reliability, efficiency and compatibility, while also making its tools useful to AI coding assistants as well as human engineers.
On the language side, Go 1.27 added generic methods on non-interface types, such as the new Rand.N method in math/rand/v2, and Go 1.26 allowed the built-in new function to take an initial value. The encoding/json/v2 and encoding/json/jsontext packages reached general availability in Go 1.27 with safer defaults and faster unmarshaling, and the original encoding/json package is now implemented on top of v2. A goroutine leak profiler also became generally available in Go 1.27 to help identify blocked goroutines in production services.
Performance work included the Green Tea garbage collector becoming the default in Go 1.26, and experimental SIMD packages for vector hardware. On security, Go 1.26 enabled hybrid post-quantum key exchanges by default, and Go 1.27 added the crypto/mldsa package. During the eMudhra certificate key disclosure incident in October, the Go Security team shipped a targeted fix in an urgent security release within seven and a half hours of initial notification.
