🐥 First beta of Go 1.16 is now available

The first beta of Go 1.16 has been released. The release notes can be found here. The most notable change is probably native support for Apple Silicon 🎉:

Go 1.16 adds support of 64-bit ARM architecture on macOS (also known as Apple Silicon) with GOOS=darwin, GOARCH=arm64. Like the darwin/amd64 port, the darwin/arm64 port supports cgo, internal and external linking, c-archive, c-shared, and pie build modes, and the race detector.

The iOS port, which was previously darwin/arm64, has been renamed to ios/arm64. GOOS=ios implies the darwin build tag, just as GOOS=android implies the linux build tag. This change should be transparent to anyone using gomobile to build iOS apps.

Go 1.16 adds an ios/amd64 port, which targets the iOS simulator running on AMD64-based macOS. Previously this was unofficially supported through darwin/amd64 with the ios build tag set.

Go 1.16 is the last release that will run on macOS 10.12 Sierra. Go 1.17 will require macOS 10.13 High Sierra or later.

Other notable changes are that there is now native support for embedding static files and file trees:

The go command now supports including static files and file trees as part of the final executable, using the new //go:embed directive. See the documentation for the new embed package for details.

Also, Go modules are now enabled by default:

Module-aware mode is enabled by default, regardless of whether a go.mod file is present in the current working directory or a parent directory. More precisely, the GO111MODULE environment variable now defaults to on. To switch to the previous behavior, set GO111MODULE to auto.

You can download the beta release here.