Go's Sweet 16

Summary

This past Monday, November 10th, we celebrated the 16th anniversary of Go’s open source release! We released Go 1.24 in February and Go 1.25 in August, following our now well-established and dependable release cadence. Continuing our mission to build the most productive language platform for building production systems, these releases included new APIs for building robust and reliable software, significant advances in Go’s track record for building secure software, and some serious under-the-hood improvements. Meanwhile, no one can ignore the seismic shifts in our industry brought by generative AI. The Go team is applying its thoughtful and uncompromising mindset to the problems and opportunities of this dynamic space, working to bring Go’s production-ready approach to building robust AI integrations, products, agents, and infrastructure. Core language and library improvements First released in Go 1.24 as an experiment and then graduated in Go 1.25, the new testing/synctest package significantly simplifies writing tests for concurrent, asynchronous code. Such code is particularly common in network services, and is traditionally very hard to test well. The synctest package works by virtualizing time itself. It takes tests that used to be slow, flaky, or both, and makes them easy to rewrite into reliable and nearly instantaneous tests, often with just a couple extra lines of code. It’s also a great example of Go’s integrated approach to software development: behind an almost trivial API, the synctest package hides a deep integration with the Go runtime and other parts of the standard library. This isn’t the only boost the testing package got over the past year. The new testing.B.Loop API is both easier to use than the original testing.B.N API and addresses many of the traditional—and often invisible!—pitfalls of writing Go benchmarks. The testing package also has new APIs that make it easy to cleanup in tests that use Context, and that make it easy to write to the tes...