Go 1.17 Release Notes

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2021-08-16 19:30:05

The latest Go release, version 1.17, arrives six months after Go 1.16. Most of its changes are in the implementation of the toolchain, runtime, and libraries. As always, the release maintains the Go 1 promise of compatibility. We expect almost all Go programs to continue to compile and run as before.

The package unsafe enhancements were added to simplify writing code that conforms to unsafe.Pointer's safety rules, but the rules remain unchanged. In particular, existing programs that correctly use unsafe.Pointer remain valid, and new programs must still follow the rules when using unsafe.Add or unsafe.Slice.

Note that the new conversion from slice to array pointer is the first case in which a type conversion can panic at run time. Analysis tools that assume type conversions can never panic should be updated to consider this possibility.

As announced in the Go 1.16 release notes, Go 1.17 requires macOS 10.13 High Sierra or later; support for previous versions has been discontinued.