Go is a statically typed, compiled programming language originally designed at Google. Go supports Arm64 out of the box and is available in all common Linux distributions. Make sure to use the latest version of the Go compiler and toolchain to get the best performance on Arm64.
Here are some noteworthy performance upgrades:
The main implementation of the Go compiler, golang/go, has improved performance on Arm64 by implementing a new way of passing function arguments and results using registers instead of the stack. This change has been available on x86-64 since 1.17, where it brought performance improvements of about 5%. On Arm this change typically gives even higher performance improvements of 10% or more.
To learn more about the use cases benefiting from Go 1.18's performance improvements, check the blog post: Making your Go workloads up to 20% faster with Go 1.18 and AWS Graviton.
The main implementation of the Go compiler, golang/go, has improved performance for the following standard library packages:
- crypto/ed25519 - the package has been rewritten, and all operations are now approximately twice as fast on Arm64.
- crypto/elliptic - CurveParams methods now automatically invoke faster and safer dedicated implementations for known curves (P-224, P-256, and P-521) when available. The P521 curve implementation has also been rewritten and is now constant-time and three times faster on Arm64.
The main implementation of the Go compiler, golang/go, has improved performance on Arm with couple of changes listed below. Building your project with Go 1.16 will give you these improvements:
- ARMv8.1-A LSE atomic instructions, which dramatically improve mutex fairness and speed on modern Arm cores with v8.1 and newer instruction set.
- copy performance improvements, especially when the addresses are unaligned.
Changes to commonly used packages that improve performance on Arm64 can make a noticeable difference in some cases. Here is a partial list of packages to be aware of.
| Package | Version | Improvements |
|---|---|---|
| Snappy | as of commit 196ae77 | assembly implementations of the hot path functions were ported from arm64 |