The open source language celebrates its sixth birthday and looks to the release of version 1.6 in early 2016 Google’s Go language, which turns six years old this week, is set for a series of improvements in the compiler and HTTP/2 realms. The planned Go 1.6 release, due early in 2016, will feature an SSA-based (static single assignment form) optimizing compiler back end. SSA simplifies and improves the results of compiler optimization, requiring that each variable is assigned only once and is defined before usage. Version 1.6 also will address HTTP/2 support for net/HTTP servers and clients. HTTP/2 is an effort to overcome technical limitations and security issues presented by HTTP/1. In other areas, Go 1.6 is slated to support blocks in text and HTML templates as well as have a memory sanitizer to check both Go and C++ code. An official package vendoring system for Go is planned, and work is under way on a Go plug-in for the Sublime Text build system. “Six years ago, the Go language was released as an open source project,” said Andrew Gerrand, developer programs engineer for the Go project, in a blog post. “Since then, more than 780 contributors have made over 30,000 commits to the project’s 22 repositories. The ecosystem continues to grow, with GitHub reporting more than 90,000 Go repositories.” Go 1.5, released in August, featured concurrent garbage collection and support for writing mobile applications. It also had a compiler tool chain written in the language. Featuring native concurrency, open source Go has been used in projects like the Docker container platform and Kubernetes, which provides orchestration for Docker. Software DevelopmentDevelopment Tools