Go 1.15 moves to beta, offering smaller binary sizes

Go 1.15, the next version of Google's popular open source, statically typed, compiled language, produces smaller binary sizes through an enhanced compiler. The runtime and linker also have been improved in the forthcoming release.

Typical binary sizes in Go 1.15, which is due for a production release in August, are reduced by about five percent compared to Go 1.14. This reduction is achieved by eliminating certain types of garbage collection metadata and more-aggressively eliminating unused type metadata.

In another compiler improvement, the toolchain now mitigates Intel CPU erratum SKX102 on GOARCH=amd64 by aligning functions to 32-byte boundaries and padding jump instructions. Although this padding increases binary sizes, this increase is more than compensated for by the release's binary size improvements. Additionally, Go 1.15 adds a -spectre flag to the compiler and the assembler to enable Spectre CPU vulnerability mitigations, though the Go team advises that these should almost never be needed.

The compiler in Go 1.15 also now rejects //go: compiler directives that have no meaning for the declarations they are applied to, reporting a "misplaced compiler directive" error. These misspelled directives were broken previously, but were silently ignored by the compiler.

Instructions for downloading the Go 1.15 beta can be found at golang.org. Other improvements in Go 1.15, based on release notes, include:

This story, "Go 1.15 moves to beta, offering smaller binary sizes" was originally published by InfoWorld.