Go 1.1 (2013-05-13)

Major Changes

Language

• Method Values: Support for assigning a method with a specific receiver to a variable as a function value.

  w := os.Stdout
  f := w.Write // f is a function bound to w
  f([]byte("hello"))

• Integer Division by Zero: Integer division by constant 0 is now a compile-time error (previously a runtime panic).

• Return Statement: Relaxed the requirement that a function must end with a return statement, as long as all execution paths have a terminating statement.

Toolchain

• Race Detector: Introduced a data race detection tool, go test -race, to detect concurrent read/write issues at runtime.
• int Type: On 64-bit platforms, int and uint changed from 32-bit to 64-bit, supporting slices with over 2 billion elements.
• Heap Size: The maximum heap size on 64-bit platforms significantly increased, supporting tens of GBs of memory usage.

Performance

Go 1.1 includes significant optimizations in the compiler, garbage collector, map implementation, and network library, with performance generally improved by 30%-40%.

Standard Library

• bufio.Scanner: Provides a simple interface to read data streams.

  scanner := bufio.NewScanner(os.Stdin)
  for scanner.Scan() {
      fmt.Println(scanner.Text()) // Read line by line
  }

• reflect: Functionality significantly enhanced, supporting MakeFunc, Select, ChanOf, MapOf, and SliceOf, etc.

• time: On Linux, FreeBSD, OS X, etc., time precision improved from microseconds to nanoseconds.

References

For more details, please refer to the official release notes: Go 1.1 Release Notes