Go language development team technical leader Russ Cox celebrates the 13th anniversary of Go open source in a blog. On November 10, 2009, Go was officially announced as an open source project, and it has been open source for 13 years now.

2022 is a very important year for Go. This year Go released Go 1.18 and Go 1.19 versions. Let’s review the new features released this year:

Go 1.18 brings a major feature to the language itself: Generics, followed by Go Workspaces, fuzzing and other important features.

• Generics, the most requested feature in the community and the biggest feature of Go this year, adds parametric polymorphism to Go to allow writing code that works for a variety of different types but is still statically checked at compile time. To learn more about generics, see the tutorial “Getting Started with Generics”.
• Fuzzing is an automated testing technique. It randomly generates test data to verify that the functionality of the code works. For example, define a fuzz test that passes any input, then try different random inputs to try and fail the fuzz test. To learn more about fuzzing, see the tutorial “Getting started with fuzzing” and the fuzzing reference.
• The Go workspace feature, which makes it easy to work on multiple modules at the same time, is very useful when maintaining a set of related modules with module dependencies. To learn about workspaces, see Beth Brown’s blog post “Familiarize yourself with workspaces” and the workspace reference.

Compared to Go 1.18, the Go 1.19 release is relatively quiet: it focuses on refining and improving the features introduced in Go 1.18, as well as internal stability improvements and optimizations, more importantly:

In addition, the Go team released this year VS Code Go An extension that provides rich language support for Go code in the VS Code editor.The Gopls language server has also been optimized for performance.

In terms of safety,Go has a new vulnerability database and a new govulncheck command that allows Go developers to learn about known vulnerabilities that may affect their projects.

In Go’s 14th year, Russ said the team will continue to work hard to make Go the best environment for software engineering at scale. The current plan is to focus specifically on supply chain security, improved compatibility and structured logging, in addition to other improvements including profile bootstrap optimizations and more.

Further reading: