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The Go programming language has released its first Release Candidate (RC) for version 1.21, which is packed with new features, improvements, and performance enhancements. This article provides an overview of the notable changes and features in Go 1.21, along with some exciting additions to the standard library.

• PGO
• min, max functions
• preview of loop capture change
• new slog, slices, and map packages
• WASI port

41 in-the-wild 0-days were detected and disclosed in 2022, the second-most ever recorded since we began tracking in mid-2014, but down from the 69 detected in 2021. Although a 40% drop might seem like a clear-cut win for improving security, the reality is more complicated.

A few years ago I wrote pygit, a small Python program that’s just enough of a Git client to create a repository, add some commits, and push itself to GitHub.

I wanted to compare what it would look like in Go, to see if it was reasonable to write small scripts in Go – quick ’n’ dirty code where performance isn’t a big deal, and stack traces are all you need for error handling.

The result is gogit, a 400-line Go program that can initialise a repository, commit, and push to GitHub. It’s written in ordinary Go … except for error handling, which is just too verbose in idiomatic Go to work well for scripting (more on that below).

Yael Tauman Kalai’s breakthroughs secure the digital world, from cloud computing to our quantum future.

My master’s thesis was titled “How to Leak a Secret.” Here’s the problem: We know how to digitally sign — to say, “This is me that wrote this message.” But say I want to sign something as an MIT professor, but I don’t want people to know it’s me? That way the secret does hold some water because you know an MIT professor signed it, but you don’t know who.

We solved this with something we called ring signatures, which were inspired by a notion in computer science called witness-indistinguishable proofs. Let’s say there’s a statement and two different ways to prove it. We say there’s two “witnesses” to the statement being correct — each of the proofs. A witness-indistinguishable proof looks the same no matter which you use: It hides which witness you started with.

Our current inlining policy remains built on a foundation that is becoming increasingly strained as we add things like PGO, is increasingly anchored in past backend limitations, and it continues to use an overly simplistic cost model driven by an overly simplistic scheduler. Between unified IR and the untapped possibilities of PGO, I believe there’s now a significant opportunity to improve the inlining policy, resulting in significant performance improvements for Go applications, and reducing the effort and expertise needed to write highly efficient Go code.

Go programmers have the good fortune of excellent testing and benchmarking tooling built into the standard library - in the testing package. However, benchmarking is hard. This isn't Go specific; it's just one of those things experienced developers learn over time.

This post lists some common benchmarking pitfalls Go programmers run into. It assumes basic familiarity with writing Go benchmarks; consult the testing package documentation if needed. While these pitfalls are presented in Go, they exist in any programming language or environment, so the lessons learned here are widely applicable.