content: add 7years.article

Change-Id: Ifa117d9d8c6514f598a944f02d11f60c6afc6bc5
Reviewed-on: https://go-review.googlesource.com/33021
Run-TryBot: Russ Cox <rsc@golang.org>
Reviewed-by: Russ Cox <rsc@golang.org>

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+Seven years of Go
+10 Nov 2016
+
+Russ Cox
+rsc@golang.org
+
+* Seven years of Go
+
+
+.html gopherbelly.html
+
+Today marks seven years since we open-sourced our preliminary sketch of Go.
+With the help of the open source community, including more than a thousand
+individual contributors to the Go source repositories,
+Go has matured into a language used all over the world.
+
+The most significant user-facing changes to Go over the past year are the
+addition of built-in support for
+[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FARQMJndUn0][HTTP/2]] in
+[[https://golang.org/doc/go1.6][Go 1.6]] and the integration of the
+[[https://blog.golang.org/context][context package]] into the standard library in [[https://golang.org/doc/go1.7][Go 1.7]].
+But we’ve been making many less visible improvements.
+Go 1.7 changed the x86-64 compiler to use a new SSA-based back end,
+improving the performance of most Go programs by 10–20%.
+For Go 1.8, planned for release next February,
+we have changed the compilers for the other architectures to use the new back end too.
+We’ve also added new ports, to Android on 32-bit x86, Linux on 64-bit MIPS,
+and Linux on IBM z Systems.
+And we’ve developed new garbage-collection techniques that reduce typical
+“stop the world” pauses to [[https://golang.org/design/17503-eliminate-rescan][under 100 microseconds]].
+(Contrast that with Go 1.5’s big news of [[https://blog.golang.org/go15gc][10 milliseconds or less]].)
+
+This year kicked off with the a global Go hackathon,
+the [[https://blog.golang.org/gophergala][Gopher Gala]], in January.
+Then there were [[https://golang.org/wiki/Conferences][Go conferences]] in India and Dubai in February,
+China and Japan in April, San Francisco in May, Denver in July,
+London in August, Paris last month, and Brazil this past weekend.
+And GothamGo in New York is next week.
+This year also saw more than 30 new [[https://golang.org/wiki/GoUserGroups][Go user groups]],
+eight new [[https://www.womenwhogo.org/][Women Who Go]] chapters,
+and four [[https://golangbridge.org/][GoBridge]] workshops around the world.
+
+We continue to be overwhelmed by and grateful for
+the enthusiasm and support of the Go community.
+Whether you participate by contributing changes, reporting bugs,
+sharing your expertise in design discussions, writing blog posts or books,
+running meetups, helping others learn or improve,
+open sourcing Go packages you wrote, or just being part of the Go community,
+the Go team thanks you for your help, your time, and your energy.
+Go would not be the success it is today without you.
+
+Thank you, and here’s to another year of fun and success with Go!