The latest Go release, version 1.9, arrives six months after Go 1.8 and is the tenth release in the Go 1.x series. There are two changes to the language: adding support for type aliases and defining when implementations may fuse floating point operations. Most of the 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 release adds transparent monotonic time support, parallelizes compilation of functions within a package, better supports test helper functions, includes a new bit manipulation package, and has a new concurrent map type.
There are two changes to the language.
Go now supports type aliases to support gradual code repair while moving a type between packages. The type alias design document and an article on refactoring cover the problem in detail. In short, a type alias declaration has the form:
type T1 = T2
  This declaration introduces an alias name T1—an
  alternate spelling—for the type denoted by T2; that is,
  both T1 and T2 denote the same type.
 
  A smaller language change is that the
  language specification
  now states when implementations are allowed to fuse floating
  point operations together, such as by using an architecture's "fused
  multiply and add" (FMA) instruction to compute x*y + z
  without rounding the intermediate result x*y.
  To force the intermediate rounding, write float64(x*y) + z.
There are no new supported operating systems or processor architectures in this release.
 
  Both GOARCH=ppc64 and GOARCH=ppc64le now
  require at least POWER8 support. In previous releases,
  only GOARCH=ppc64le required POWER8 and the big
  endian ppc64 architecture supported older
  hardware.
Go 1.9 is the last release that will run on FreeBSD 9.3, which is already unsupported by FreeBSD. Go 1.10 will require FreeBSD 10.3+.
Go 1.9 now enables PT_TLS generation for cgo binaries and thus requires OpenBSD 6.0 or newer. Go 1.9 no longer supports OpenBSD 5.9.
There are some instabilities on FreeBSD that are known but not understood. These can lead to program crashes in rare cases. See issue 15658. Any help in solving this FreeBSD-specific issue would be appreciated.
Go stopped running NetBSD builders during the Go 1.9 development cycle due to NetBSD kernel crashes, up to and including NetBSD 7.1. As Go 1.9 is being released, NetBSD 7.1.1 is being released with a fix. However, at this time we have no NetBSD builders passing our test suite. Any help investigating the various NetBSD issues would be appreciated.
  The Go compiler now supports compiling a package's functions in parallel, taking
  advantage of multiple cores. This is in addition to the go command's
  existing support for parallel compilation of separate packages.
  Parallel compilation is on by default, but it can be disabled by setting the
  environment variable GO19CONCURRENTCOMPILATION to 0.
  By popular request, ./... no longer matches packages
  in vendor directories in tools accepting package names,
  such as go test. To match vendor
  directories, write ./vendor/....
  The go tool will now use the path from which it
  was invoked to attempt to locate the root of the Go install tree.
  This means that if the entire Go installation is moved to a new
  location, the go tool should continue to work as usual.
  This may be overridden by setting GOROOT in the environment,
  which should only be done in unusual circumstances.
  Note that this does not affect the result of
  the runtime.GOROOT function, which
  will continue to report the original installation location;
  this may be fixed in later releases.
Complex division is now C99-compatible. This has always been the case in gccgo and is now fixed in the gc toolchain.
The linker will now generate DWARF information for cgo executables on Windows.
 
  The compiler now includes lexical scopes in the generated DWARF if the
  -N -l flags are provided, allowing
  debuggers to hide variables that are not in scope. The .debug_info
  section is now DWARF version 4.
 
  The values of GOARM and GO386 now affect a
  compiled package's build ID, as used by the go tool's
  dependency caching.
 
  The four-operand ARM MULA instruction is now assembled correctly,
  with the addend register as the third argument and the result
  register as the fourth and final argument.
  In previous releases, the two meanings were reversed.
  The three-operand form, in which the fourth argument is implicitly
  the same as the third, is unaffected.
  Code using four-operand MULA instructions
  will need to be updated, but we believe this form is very rarely used.
  MULAWT and MULAWB were already
  using the correct order in all forms and are unchanged.
 
  The assembler now supports ADDSUBPS/PD, completing the
  two missing x86 SSE3 instructions.
  Long lists of arguments are now truncated. This improves the readability
  of go doc on some generated code.
  Viewing documentation on struct fields is now supported.
  For example, go doc http.Client.Jar.
 
  The new go env -json flag
  enables JSON output, instead of the default OS-specific output
  format.
 
  The go test
  command accepts a new -list flag, which takes a regular
  expression as an argument and prints to stdout the name of any
  tests, benchmarks, or examples that match it, without running them.
 
  Profiles produced by the runtime/pprof package now
  include symbol information, so they can be viewed
  in go tool pprof
  without the binary that produced the profile.
 
  The go tool pprof command now
  uses the HTTP proxy information defined in the environment, using
  http.ProxyFromEnvironment.
  The vet command
  has been better integrated into the
  go tool,
  so go vet now supports all standard build
  flags while vet's own flags are now available
  from go vet as well as
  from go tool vet.
Due to the alignment of Go's semiannual release schedule with GCC's annual release schedule, GCC release 7 contains the Go 1.8.3 version of gccgo. We expect that the next release, GCC 8, will contain the Go 1.10 version of gccgo.
  Users of
  runtime.Callers
  should avoid directly inspecting the resulting PC slice and instead use
  runtime.CallersFrames
  to get a complete view of the call stack, or
  runtime.Caller
  to get information about a single caller.
  This is because an individual element of the PC slice cannot account
  for inlined frames or other nuances of the call stack.
  Specifically, code that directly iterates over the PC slice and uses
  functions such as
  runtime.FuncForPC
  to resolve each PC individually will miss inlined frames.
  To get a complete view of the stack, such code should instead use
  CallersFrames.
  Likewise, code should not assume that the length returned by
  Callers is any indication of the call depth.
  It should instead count the number of frames returned by
  CallersFrames.
  Code that queries a single caller at a specific depth should use
  Caller rather than passing a slice of length 1 to
  Callers.
  runtime.CallersFrames
  has been available since Go 1.7, so code can be updated prior to
  upgrading to Go 1.9.
As always, the changes are so general and varied that precise statements about performance are difficult to make. Most programs should run a bit faster, due to speedups in the garbage collector, better generated code, and optimizations in the core library.
 
  Library functions that used to trigger stop-the-world garbage
  collection now trigger concurrent garbage collection.
  Specifically, runtime.GC,
  debug.SetGCPercent,
  and
  debug.FreeOSMemory,
  now trigger concurrent garbage collection, blocking only the calling
  goroutine until the garbage collection is done.
 
  The
  debug.SetGCPercent
  function only triggers a garbage collection if one is immediately
  necessary because of the new GOGC value.
  This makes it possible to adjust GOGC on-the-fly.
Large object allocation performance is significantly improved in applications using large (>50GB) heaps containing many large objects.
 
  The runtime.ReadMemStats
  function now takes less than 100µs even for very large heaps.
 
  The time package now transparently
  tracks monotonic time in each Time
  value, making computing durations between two Time values
  a safe operation in the presence of wall clock adjustments.
  See the package docs and
  design document
  for details.
 
  Go 1.9 includes a new package,
  math/bits, with optimized
  implementations for manipulating bits. On most architectures,
  functions in this package are additionally recognized by the
  compiler and treated as intrinsics for additional performance.
 
  The
  new (*T).Helper
  and (*B).Helper
  methods mark the calling function as a test helper function.  When
  printing file and line information, that function will be skipped.
  This permits writing test helper functions while still having useful
  line numbers for users.
 
  The new Map type
  in the sync package
  is a concurrent map with amortized-constant-time loads, stores, and
  deletes. It is safe for multiple goroutines to call a Map's methods
  concurrently.
  The runtime/pprof package
  now supports adding labels to pprof profiler records.
  Labels form a key-value map that is used to distinguish calls of the
  same function in different contexts when looking at profiles
  with the pprof command.
  The pprof package's
  new Do function
  runs code associated with some provided labels. Other new functions
  in the package help work with labels.
As always, there are various minor changes and updates to the library, made with the Go 1 promise of compatibility in mind.
      The
      ZIP Writer
      now sets the UTF-8 bit in
      the FileHeader.Flags
      when appropriate.
    
      On Linux, Go now calls the getrandom system call
      without the GRND_NONBLOCK flag; it will now block
      until the kernel has sufficient randomness. On kernels predating
      the getrandom system call, Go continues to read
      from /dev/urandom.
    
      On Unix systems the environment
      variables SSL_CERT_FILE
      and SSL_CERT_DIR can now be used to override the
      system default locations for the SSL certificate file and SSL
      certificate files directory, respectively.
    
The FreeBSD file /usr/local/etc/ssl/cert.pem is
      now included in the certificate search path.
    
      The package now supports excluded domains in name constraints.
      In addition to enforcing such constraints,
      CreateCertificate
      will create certificates with excluded name constraints
      if the provided template certificate has the new
      field
      ExcludedDNSDomains
      populated.
    
    If any SAN extension, including with no DNS names, is present
    in the certificate, then the Common Name from
    Subject is ignored.
    In previous releases, the code tested only whether DNS-name SANs were
    present in a certificate.
    
      The package will now use a cached Stmt if
      available in Tx.Stmt.
      This prevents statements from being re-prepared each time
      Tx.Stmt is called.
    
      The package now allows drivers to implement their own argument checkers by implementing
      driver.NamedValueChecker.
      This also allows drivers to support OUTPUT and INOUT parameter types.
      Out should be used to return output parameters
      when supported by the driver.
    
      Rows.Scan can now scan user-defined string types.
      Previously the package supported scanning into numeric types like type Int int64. It now also supports
      scanning into string types like type String string.
    
      The new DB.Conn method returns the new
      Conn type representing an
      exclusive connection to the database from the connection pool. All queries run on
      a Conn will use the same underlying
      connection until Conn.Close is called
      to return the connection to the connection pool.
    
	  The new
	  NullBytes
	  and
	  NullRawValue
	  represent the ASN.1 NULL type.
    
The new Encoding.WithPadding method adds support for custom padding characters and disabling padding.
      The new field
      Reader.ReuseRecord
      controls whether calls to
      Read
      may return a slice sharing the backing array of the previous
      call's returned slice for improved performance.
    
      The sharp flag ('#') is now supported when printing
      floating point and complex numbers. It will always print a
      decimal point
      for %e, %E, %f, %F, %g
      and %G; it will not remove trailing zeros
      for %g and %G.
    
      The package now includes 128-bit FNV-1 and FNV-1a hash support with
      New128 and
      New128a, respectively.
    
The package now reports an error if a predefined escaper (one of "html", "urlquery" and "js") is found in a pipeline and does not match what the auto-escaper would have decided on its own. This avoids certain security or correctness issues. Now use of one of these escapers is always either a no-op or an error. (The no-op case eases migration from text/template.)
	  The Rectangle.Intersect
	  method now returns a zero Rectangle when called on
	  adjacent but non-overlapping rectangles, as documented. In
	  earlier releases it would incorrectly return an empty but
	  non-zero Rectangle.
    
The YCbCr to RGBA conversion formula has been tweaked to ensure that rounding adjustments span the complete [0, 0xffff] RGBA range.
	  The new Encoder.BufferPool
	  field allows specifying an EncoderBufferPool,
	  that will be used by the encoder to get temporary EncoderBuffer
	  buffers when encoding a PNG image.
	  The use of a BufferPool reduces the number of
	  memory allocations performed while encoding multiple images.
    
The package now supports the decoding of transparent 8-bit grayscale ("Gray8") images.
      The new
      IsInt64
      and
      IsUint64
      methods report whether an Int
      may be represented as an int64 or uint64
      value.
    
      The new
      FileHeader.Size
      field describes the size of a file in a multipart message.
    
      The new
      Resolver.StrictErrors
      provides control over how Go's built-in DNS resolver handles
      temporary errors during queries composed of multiple sub-queries,
      such as an A+AAAA address lookup.
    
      The new
      Resolver.Dial
      allows a Resolver to use a custom dial function.
    
      JoinHostPort now only places an address in square brackets if the host contains a colon.
      In previous releases it would also wrap addresses in square brackets if they contained a percent ('%') sign.
    
      The new methods
      TCPConn.SyscallConn,
      IPConn.SyscallConn,
      UDPConn.SyscallConn,
      and
      UnixConn.SyscallConn
      provide access to the connections' underlying file descriptors.
    
      It is now safe to call Dial with the address obtained from
      (*TCPListener).String() after creating the listener with
      Listen("tcp", ":0").
      Previously it failed on some machines with half-configured IPv6 stacks.
    
      The Cookie.String method, used for
      Cookie and Set-Cookie headers, now encloses values in double quotes
      if the value contains either a space or a comma.
    
Server changes:
ServeMux now ignores ports in the host
        header when matching handlers. The host is matched unmodified for CONNECT requests.
      Server.WriteTimeout
        now applies to HTTP/2 connections and is enforced per-stream.
      StripPrefix
        now calls its provided handler with a modified clone of the original *http.Request.
        Any code storing per-request state in maps keyed by *http.Request should
        use
        Request.Context,
        Request.WithContext,
        and
        context.WithValue instead.
      Client & Transport changes:
Transport
        now supports making requests via SOCKS5 proxy when the URL returned by
        Transport.Proxy
        has the scheme socks5.
      
      The new
      ProcessEnv
      function returns FastCGI environment variables associated with an HTTP request
      for which there are no appropriate
      http.Request
      fields, such as REMOTE_USER.
    
      The new
      Server.Client
      method returns an HTTP client configured for making requests to the test server.
    
      The new
      Server.Certificate
      method returns the test server's TLS certificate, if any.
    
      The ReverseProxy
      now proxies all HTTP/2 response trailers, even those not declared in the initial response
      header. Such undeclared trailers are used by the gRPC protocol.
    
      The os package now uses the internal runtime poller
      for file I/O.
      This reduces the number of threads required for read/write
      operations on pipes, and it eliminates races when one goroutine
      closes a file while another is using the file for I/O.
    
      On Windows,
      Args
      is now populated without shell32.dll, improving process start-up time by 1-7 ms.
      
      The os/exec package now prevents child processes from being created with
      any duplicate environment variables.
      If Cmd.Env
      contains duplicate environment keys, only the last
      value in the slice for each duplicate key is used.
    
      Lookup and
      LookupId now
      work on Unix systems when CGO_ENABLED=0 by reading
      the /etc/passwd file.
    
      LookupGroup and
      LookupGroupId now
      work on Unix systems when CGO_ENABLED=0 by reading
      the /etc/group file.
    
      The new
      MakeMapWithSize
      function creates a map with a capacity hint.
    
      Tracebacks generated by the runtime and recorded in profiles are
      now accurate in the presence of inlining.
      To retrieve tracebacks programmatically, applications should use
      runtime.CallersFrames
      rather than directly iterating over the results of
      runtime.Callers.
    
On Windows, Go no longer forces the system timer to run at high resolution when the program is idle. This should reduce the impact of Go programs on battery life.
      On FreeBSD, GOMAXPROCS and
      runtime.NumCPU
      are now based on the process' CPU mask, rather than the total
      number of CPUs.
    
The runtime has preliminary support for Android O.
      Calling
      SetGCPercent
      with a negative value no longer runs an immediate garbage collection.
    
The execution trace now displays mark assist events, which indicate when an application goroutine is forced to assist garbage collection because it is allocating too quickly.
"Sweep" events now encompass the entire process of finding free space for an allocation, rather than recording each individual span that is swept. This reduces allocation latency when tracing allocation-heavy programs. The sweep event shows how many bytes were swept and how many were reclaimed.
      Mutex is now more fair.
    
      The new field
      Credential.NoSetGroups
      controls whether Unix systems make a setgroups system call
      to set supplementary groups when starting a new process.
    
      The new field
      SysProcAttr.AmbientCaps
      allows setting ambient capabilities on Linux 4.3+ when creating
      a new process.
    
      On 64-bit x86 Linux, process creation latency has been optimized with
      use of CLONE_VFORK and CLONE_VM.
    
      The new
      Conn
      interface describes some types in the
      net
      package that can provide access to their underlying file descriptor
      using the new
      RawConn
      interface.
    
      The package now chooses values in the full range when
      generating int64 and uint64 random
      numbers; in earlier releases generated values were always
      limited to the [-262, 262) range.
    
      In previous releases, using a nil
      Config.Rand
      value caused a fixed deterministic random number generator to be used.
      It now uses a random number generator seeded with the current time.
      For the old behavior, set Config.Rand to rand.New(rand.NewSource(0)).
    
The handling of empty blocks, which was broken by a Go 1.8 change that made the result dependent on the order of templates, has been fixed, restoring the old Go 1.7 behavior.
      The new methods
      Duration.Round
      and
      Duration.Truncate
      handle rounding and truncating durations to multiples of a given duration.
    
Retrieving the time and sleeping now work correctly under Wine.
      If a Time value has a monotonic clock reading, its
      string representation (as returned by String) now includes a
      final field "m=±value", where value is the
      monotonic clock reading formatted as a decimal number of seconds.
    
      The included tzdata timezone database has been
      updated to version 2017b. As always, it is only used if the
      system does not already have the database available.