Wednesday marked the release of the sixth major stable release of Google’s Go programming language with version 1.5. It is currently available for download right now.

Go, also known as golang, was developed in 2007 by Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, and Ken Thompson. It is a language beloved by many developers, making a high of 72.5 percent and fourth “most loved” amid developers surveyed for Stack Overflow’s 2015 Developer Survey.

The big news about this release is that the compiler tool chain, the executable programs used to compile Go source, has been entirely swapped out from C to Go. This is interesting because it means that now Go can be used to compile its own compiler and assembler, which means that programmers who use Go can more easily make custom tools for Go compilation without needing to know C (or use tools that compile C.)

The update also enhances the garbage collector, which will reduce garbage collection pause times. It also improves the scheduler to increase the number of concurrently executing threads in Go (called goroutines) to take advantage to multiple logical CPUs better. And changes to the linker tool now enable the distribution of Go packages as libraries, the compilation of Go programs into archives or shared libraries—and can also be linked into or loaded by C programs.

As for operating systems, Go has been ported to darwin/arm, darwin/arm64 (Apple’s iPhone and iPad devices) and linux/arm64—and also now has experimental support for ppc64 and ppc64le (IBM 64-bit PowerPC, big and little endian).

Developers interested in all the details can see the full release notes and get the software downloaded now.

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