Cross posted from the HN discussion, here are some changes in this release:

The sort pkg now has a convenience for sorting slices, which will be a nice shortcut instead of having to define a special slice type just to sort on a given criteria, you can just pass a sorting function instead.

HTTP/2 Push is now in the server, which is fun, but like context might take a while for people to start using in earnest. Likewise graceful shutdown. Is anyone experimenting with this yet?

Plugins are here, but on Linux only for now - this will be interesting long term for things like server software which wants to let other compile plugins for it and distribute them separately, presently that has to be compiled in to the main binary.

Performance: GC times are now down to 10-100 microseconds, and defer and cgo are also faster, so incremental improvements.

GOPATH is optional now, but you still do need a path where all go code is kept, perhaps eventually this requirement will go away - GOPATH/pkg is just a cache, GOPATH/bin is just an install location, and GOPATH/src could really be anywhere, so I'm not sure if long term a special go directory is required at all if vendoring takes off, then import paths could be project-local.

Here is a slide deck with a rundown of all the changes from Dave Cheney.

Finally, as someone using Go for work, thanks to the Go team and everyone who contributed to this release. I really appreciate the incremental but significant changes in every release, and the stability of the core language.