What a year it's been for Go! Both Go 1.8 and 1.9 were released, Go made it into the top 10 most popular languages on the TIOBE index, and Go's now the fastest growing language on GitHub. 2018 is looking very promising :-)

In this final issue of the year, we're looking back at the most popular Go news and links of 2017. We hope you have a happy holiday season and we'll see you next on January 11, 2018 :-)

- The Golang Weekly Team (Peter, Chris, and Za'e)

The Top Articles of 2017

Go 1.9's Release Notes August 2017's Go 1.9 remains the most recent mainstream release of Go and included type aliases, parallel compilation, and GC speedups. golang.​org Understand Go Pointers in Fewer Than 800 Words One of Go’s most active contributors explains pointers from the ground up, complete with diagrams. Dave Cheney The Ultimate Guide to Writing a Go Tool A very thorough tutorial for building a tool to add tags to struct fields via command line or within an editor. Fatih Arslan See What Your Program Is Really Doing With 'go tool trace' If you haven’t used it yet, this is a good look at a handy Go tool for monitoring your program’s usage of goroutines, memory, threads, and more. Will Sewell Holiday Code Freeze? - 7 Things to Do Instead of Deploying Around this time of year, many companies institute a “code freeze” that puts a stop to new deploys for a certain period of time... CircleCI   sponsored  How to Ship Production-Grade Go A look at several things you can do to make your code more robust, debuggable, and ready for production. Kavya Joshi Understanding Tensorflow Using Go An error-driven approach to learning the Tensorflow architecture and what is possible with the Go binding. (Tensorflow is a popular machine learning library.) Paolo Galeone Error Handling Patterns for Go Developers Some patterns around the proper use of defer, how to wrap error checks to avoid duplication, and adding context to your errors. Nemanja Mijailovic Using Code Generation to Survive Without Generics Learn how to use code generation to create type-safe code (like a Queue or LinkedList) without having to rewrite the same thing over and over again. Jon Calhoun A Theory of Modern Go A case for dependency injection over of global variables and init() functions. Peter Bourgon