Go1.17 is current stable Go release which, besides other improvements, compared to Go1.16 generates code that runs 5-10-15% faster(*):

https://go.dev/blog/go1.17

It makes sense to use that version by default.

Cc'ing people who might be affected:

• caddy (@luke)
• hugo (@lu.xu)
• repman, restic (@alain.takoudjou, @jerome)
• galene (@tomo, @alain.takoudjou)
• gitlab (@alain.takoudjou, @jerome, @lpgeneau)
• grafana (@jerome)
• theia (@jerome, @xavier_thompson)

I propose, that if for some reason Go1.17 default does not work for a software-release, that software release pins Go to Go1.16 explicitly inside itself.

(*) Go blog mentions 5% speedup on the average, but it was reported that sometimes for important inner loops the speedup can be as much as 15%.