• stats: Deprecate InPayload.Data and OutPayload.Data; they were experimental and will be deleted in the next release (#7121)

• codec: Remove handling of environment variable GRPC_GO_ADVERTISE_COMPRESSORS to suppress setting supported compressors in grpc-accept-encoding header. Compressors will always be advertised, as they have been by default for some time (#7203)

• resolver/dns: Add SetMinResolutionInterval to set the minimum interval at which DNS re-resolutions may occur (#6962)
  • Special Thanks: @HomayoonAlimohammadi
• peer/peer: Implement the fmt.Stringer interface for pretty printing Peer, and
• metadata/metadata: Implement the fmt.Stringer interface for pretty printing MD (#7137)
  • Special Thanks: @AnomalRoil

• client: Improve RPC performance by reducing work while holding a lock (#7132)

• transport/server: Display the proper timeout value when keepalive pings are not ack'd in time (#7038)
  • Special Thanks: @BatmanAoD
• channelz: Fix bug that was causing the subchannel's target to be unset (#7189)
• stats: Fix bug where peer was not set in context when calling stats handler for OutPayload, InPayload, and End (#7096)

• deps: Remove dependency on deprecated github.com/golang/protobuf module (#7122)

• grpc: Deprecate WithBlock, WithReturnConnectionError, FailOnNonTempDialError which are ignored by NewClient (#7097)
  • Special Thanks: @pellared
• grpc: Deprecate Dial and DialContext. These will continue to be supported throughout 1.x, but are deprecated to direct users to NewClient (See #7090 for more information)
• examples: Add custom lb example (#6691)

• Fix the user agent string

• grpc: un-deprecate Dial and DialContext and cherry-pick

• Update http2 library to address vulnerability CVE-2023-45288

• Update http2 library to address vulnerability CVE-2023-45288

• grpc: Return canonical target string from resolver.Address.String() (experimental) (#6923)
• client & server: when using write buffer pooling, use input value for buffer size instead of size*2 (#6983)
  • Special Thanks: @raghav-stripe

• grpc: add ClientConn.CanonicalTarget() to return the canonical target string. (#7006)
• xds: implement LRS named metrics support (gRFC A64) (#7027)
  • Special Thanks: @danielzhaotongliu
• grpc: introduce grpc.NewClient to allow users to create new clients in idle mode and with "dns" as the default resolver (#7010)
  • Special Thanks: @bruuuuuuuce

• grpc: stabilize experimental method ClientConn.Target() (#7006)

• xds: fix an issue that would cause the client to send an empty list of resources for LDS/CDS upon reconnecting with the management server (#7026)
• server: Fix some errors returned by a server when using a grpc.Server as an http.Handler with the Go stdlib HTTP server (#6989)
• resolver/dns: add SetResolvingTimeout to allow configuring the DNS resolver's global timeout (#6917)
  • Special Thanks: @and1truong
• Set the security level of Windows named pipes to NoSecurity (#6956)
  • Special Thanks: @irsl

• xds: fix a bug that results in no matching virtual host found RPC errors due to a difference between the target and LDS resource names (#6997)
• server: fixed stats handler data InPayload.Length for unary RPC calls (#6766)
  • Special Thanks: @hueypark
• grpc: the experimental RecvBufferPool DialOption and ServerOption are now active during unary RPCs with compression (#6766)
  • Special Thanks: @hueypark
• grpc: trim whitespaces in accept-encoding header before determining compressors
  • Special Thanks: @sercand

The latest released version of stackdriver depends upon an unstable version of prometheus. Symbols needed by stackdriver were moved inside of prometheus after this release. To address this, this release updates our dependencies to use an unreleased version of stackdriver (which is archived) that removed its dependency on prometheus entirely. Please see https://github.com/grpc/grpc-go/pull/7008 for more details.

New Features

• grpc: Add StaticMethod CallOption as a signal to stats handler that a method is safe to use as an instrument key (#6986)

Behavior Changes

• grpc: Return canonical target string from ClientConn.Target() and resolver.Address.String() (#6923)

Bug Fixes

• server: wait to close connection until incoming socket is drained (with timeout) to prevent data loss on client-side (#6977)
  • Special Thanks: @s-matyukevich for discovering the root cause

Performance Improvements

• *: Allow building without x/net/trace by using grpcnotrace to enable dead code elimination (#6954)
  • Special Thanks: @hugelgupf
• rand: improve performance and simplify implementation of grpcrand by adopting math/rand's top-level functions for go version 1.21.0 and newer. (#6925)
  • Special Thanks: @kmirzavaziri

Dependencies

• *: Use google.golang.org/protobuf/proto instead of github.com/golang/protobuf. (#6919)
  • Special Thanks: @Clement-Jean

[!NOTE] The above change in proto library usage introduces a minor behavior change within those libraries. The old github.com/golang/protobuf library would error if given a nil message to Marshal, while the new google.golang.org/protobuf library will successfully output zero bytes in this case. This means server method handlers that did return nil, nil will now return an empty message and no error, while it used to return an error. This also affects the client side, where clients sending nil messages used to fail without sending the RPC, and now they will send an empty message.

Bug Fixes

• server: wait to close connection until incoming socket is drained (with timeout) to prevent data loss on client-side (#6977)
  • Special Thanks: @s-matyukevich for discovering the root cause