General Availability: September 5, 2025

IBM Open Enterprise SDK for Go is a compiler for the Go programming language that supports the z/OS platform. The capabilities and widespread use of Go can make it a natural addition to z/OS as the IBM Z platform continues to advance and support application modernization. It offers a powerful framework for building fast and scalable applications for z/OS and provides the facility to write applications in support of cloud infrastructures. It can take advantage of the colocation of your data and existing applications on IBM Z to increase throughput and reduce response time.

What's new in Open Enterprise SDK for Go 1.25

Capabilities from IBM

Open Enterprise SDK for Go 1.25 added value through z/OS specific capabilities

Compression
Compression acceleration using zEnterprise Data Compression
Utilizes hardware acceleration to facilitate preexisting Go-centric compression and decompressions.

Diagnostics

Diagnostics improvement with improved messaging and handling

Provides additional information in the event of a system crash. The resulting information includes added z/OS diagnostics about user abend codes for difficult problem determination scenarios, and information for exec resource errors. The continued contributions to diagnostics facilitates improves handling of hanging and error response.

Added capabilities from IBM that align with the Go 1.25 community release

Features from the Go Community

• Use the strengths of IBM Z and the agility of container technology with IBM z/OS Container Platform and native Go container image. Embrace a DevOps model utilizing common industry standard tooling and automated CI/CD pipeline to improve development productivity. Exploit an isolated self-service environment for development and test.
• Clients can use Go to develop RESTful APIs to communicate with existing services, plugin code to hook into other subsystems, or wrappers to other APIs or services to support or extend existing business logic. Alternatively, use GraphQL APIs for better performance.
• Interface with IBM z/OS UNIX system services and datasets: Easily interface with 31-bit services (MVS), read and write datasets (VSAM, Db2, and DVM) using Go recordio module ibmruntimes and, or go-recordio module.
• Interoperate with COBOL, PL/I, Assembler: Communicate and interoperate with existing business critical applications using the CGO function. Call into any C code during the execution of a Go program.
• Automated porting : Port existing packages in a distributed workspace to z/OS using the automated porting tool, Wharf. Make edits and run commands to ensure the package can be installed on z/OS without error.

• Use Go to develop fast and easy-to-use native command line tools: Go has a rich set of libraries for various tasks such as manipulating text files and data.
  
  

For more information on the contents of the Go 1.25 open source release from the Go community see:

Go 1.25 Release Notes

Additional blogs and resources:

• Easy Peasy: Go Calling Cobol Calling Go on z/OS
• Official announcement letter with use-cases
• Go on z/OS 1.24 Container Updates
• Access DVM with Go-Recordio on z/OS
• Product page
• IBM Documentation