Others already noted - it's backwards-compatible. But it's actually even a bit easier than that for an all-Go project. On Ubuntu, the easiest way to have go i

Others already noted - it's backwards-compatible. But it's actually even a bit easier than that for an all-Go project. On Ubuntu, the easiest way to have go installed is to use gvm ( https://github.com/moovweb/gvm https://github.com/moovweb/gvm ). Which means you do something like: $ gvm install go1.7 $ gvm use go1.7 $ go build myproj Errors? Fix them - and in the meantime, just switch back: $ gvm use go1.6 $ go build myproj It's impressively painless. I went from go1.4 to 1.6 without having to change a single line of code -- but the 'go vet' tool got better, so when I re-ran it, it pointed out a few things that I then fixed. The compile didn't break without them, notably.