• Go's Current Status and Future Plans: The last few years have focused on maturing the Go platform for mainstream users. Added generics, feature flags for backwards compatibility, automatic updates for forward compatibility, improved software supply chain security. Made major improvements to IDE support in VS Code and gopls. Improved Go's support for production systems with structured logging, better HTTP routing, enhanced code coverage, vulnerability management, and profile-guided optimization. On the business front, Go is growing in the cloud market.
• The Impact of AI: AI, especially generative AI using large language models, is a hot topic. Many programmers are skeptical but there is a history of building reliable systems from unreliable components. Programmers engage with AI on two fronts: assistance (to be more productive) and applications (to serve users better). Some predict AI will make programming languages obsolete in favor of natural language, but the author disagrees as programming languages have specific advantages.
• AI Developer Assistance: Takes the form of code completion in the IDE. Can also generate, explain, translate code, generate documentation, etc. There are errors in AI-generated code and humans also make errors. Programmers have developed various ways to validate code. There is a connection between AI training data and software supply chain security. The author believes most programmers will use AI assistance and is investigating how to improve it for Go developers, such as improving code quality, learning new language features, evaluating model performance, and prompting IDEs. Special thanks to Hana Kim for reviewing and providing suggestions.