Go 1.15 Released With Much Improved Linker, New CPU Mitigations

Written by Michael Larabel in Programming on 11 August 2020 at 06:55 PM EDT. 13 Comments
PROGRAMMING
Go 1.15 is out as a rather significant update to this popular, modern programming language.

Go 1.15 brings a wide variety of improvements including:

- The Go linker now has much lower resource use, is faster, and has improved code quality. Generally for large Go programs the linking process is around 20% faster while using around 30% less memory.

- Go 1.15 binaries are around 5% smaller compared to Go 1.14.

- Go 1.15 adds a "-spectre" flag to enable Spectre mitigations for the compiler and assembler.

- Go now mitigates the Intel JCC Erratum by aligning functions to 32-byte boundaries and padding jump instructions.

- Go now has better OpenBSD support for ARM/ARM64 where as previously it was just in good shape for i386 and AMD64.

- Stability and performance work for the Go 64-bit RISC-V port along with supporting more features like asynchronous preemption.

- Go on 32-bit x86 hardware now requires CPUs with at least SSE2 support.

- Allocating small objects is much faster with higher core count systems.

More details on Go 1.15 via the release notes.
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Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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