Today we announce Go 1.4, the fifth major stable release of Go,
arriving six months after our previous major release Go 1.3. It
contains a small language change, support for more operating systems
and processor architectures, and improvements to the tool chain
and libraries. As always, Go 1.4 keeps the promise of compatibility,
and almost everything will continue to compile and run without
change when moved to 1.4. For the full details, see the Go 1.4
release notes.
The most notable new feature in this release is official support
for Android. Using the support in the core and the libraries in
the golang.org/x/mobile repository, it is now possible to write
simple Android apps using only Go code. At this stage, the support
libraries are still nascent and under heavy development. Early
adopters should expect a bumpy ride, but we welcome the community
to get involved.
The language change is a tweak to the syntax of for-range loops.
You may now write "for range s {" to loop over each item from s,
without having to assign the value, loop index, or map key. See
the release notes for details.
The go command has a new subcommand, go generate, to automate the
running of tools to generate source code before compilation. For
example, it can be used to automate the generation of String methods
for typed constants using the new stringer tool. For more information,
see the design document.
Most programs will run about the same speed or slightly faster in
1.4 than in 1.3; some will be slightly slower. There are many
changes, making it hard to be precise about what to expect. See
the release notes for more discussion.
And, of course, there are many more improvements and bug fixes.
In case you missed it, a few weeks ago the sub-repositories were
moved to new locations. For example, the go.tools packages are now
imported from "golang.org/x/tools". See the announcement post for
details.
This release also coincides with the project's move from Mercurial
to Git (for source control), Rietveld to Gerrit (for code review),
and Google Code to Github (for issue tracking and wiki). The move
affects the core Go repository and its sub-repositories. You can
find the canonical Git repositories at go.googlesource.com, and
the issue tracker and wiki at the golang/go GitHub repo.
Fixes "go get code.google.com/p/..." for me, once security/mozilla-rootcerts
installed and configured (with the default settings).
Bumps PKGREVISION, since the package is modified.
ok bsiegert@
The Go programming language is an open source project to make
programmers more productive.
Go is expressive, concise, clean, and efficient. Its concurrency
mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of
multicore and networked machines, while its novel type system enables
flexible and modular program construction. Go compiles quickly to
machine code yet has the convenience of garbage collection and the power
of run-time reflection. It's a fast, statically typed, compiled language
that feels like a dynamically typed, interpreted language.
