Bookmarks (144)

▶  What's New in Go: Google's Take — Released as part of last week’s Google I/O, Go’s project lead and lead devrel team up to present an extensive list of recent additions and improvements to Go. It’s good to see Google presenting an official roundup and there’s more depth in 20 minutes than you might expect (though you can skip the first few minutes which...

Night Knight: A 60 FPS Go Remake of an 80's Videogame — A reader and their partner made an Ebitengine powered retro game, converted from a game originally on the 1980’s MSX home computer. It’s available to download for Windows only.

vipsgen: Go Binding Generator for libvips — libvps is a popular and efficient image processing library. vipsgen lets you generate Go bindings against a libvips install that are type-safe, robust, and fully documented.

godump: A Pretty-Printer and Debug Dumper for Structs — Inspired by a similar feature in Laravel, this library lets you print structs, slices, maps, and more, in an easy to read fashion at the terminal.

FSBroker: Broker, Group, Dedup, and Filter FSNotify Events — A library that sits on top of fsnotify (which works cross-platform) and converts raw file system events into a more usable form.

chafa-go: Render Images in the Terminal with Chafa — Go bindings for Chafa, a C library that uses smart combinations of Unicode symbols to render graphics in terminal environments (or pass images through to terminal emulators with direct image rendering abilities). It uses purego to avoid needing CGO but does need Go 1.24.

CodeRabbit’s Free AI Code Reviews in IDE - VS Code, Cursor, Windsurf — AI code reviews in VS Code, Cursor & Windsurf: line-by-line checks, one-click fixes & code-aware feedback - free in your IDE. Install now.

The Generics Way to Use GORM — GORM is a popular ORM library for Go and its latest release (v1.30.0) has added support for using generics. This post shows off the benefits.

Solving Flaky Tests with Go 1.24's synctest — Goroutine scheduling can introduce hard-to-debug complexity to tests, but Go 1.24’s synctest package can make it easier to test concurrent code by introducing isolated ‘bubbles’ to keep things coordinated and more deterministic.

The Results of Go's Cryptography Security Audit — The core team brought in an external security firm to audit Go’s cryptography packages, resulting in a single low-severity issue in an unsupported integration (fixed in Go 1.24) and various other findings. The team also explains some other security enhancements coming to Go soon.

New Experimental 'Green Tea' Garbage Collector — A proposal outlining a new span-based, “memory-aware” GC algorithm focused on small objects that improves spatial and temporal locality on modern multi-CPU systems by better exploiting memory topologies and cache hierarchies. Benchmarks are mixed, but it’s early days. You can try it out today with gotip and it’s slated to be an opt-in experiment in Go 1.25.

UPX 5.0: The 'Ultimate Packer' for EXecutables — Staying on the theme of compression.. UPX is a tool that adds run-time compression and decompression to executables to reduce their size. It’s not Go specific but can work on Go executables as Ben Boyter discovered back in 2019.

Compress: Optimized Compression Packages for Go — Covers a variety of compression standards like zstandard, S2, gzip, snappy, and zip.

Goldmark: A Markdown Parser Written in Go — Pure Go, easy to extend, and CommonMark compliant (which GitHub-Flavored Markdown is based upon). There’s also a WebAssembly powered Goldmark playground you can try.

Fx 36.0: A Command-Line JSON Processing Tool — If you’ve got some files full of JSON that you want to slice and dice, Fx is for you. Notably, v36 adds support for streaming JSON and tailing such streams, it’s also much faster and less memory hungry when parsing the largest of JSON files. A solid update for a very handy tool.

Outpost: Outbound Webhooks and Event Destinations Infrastructure — A way to add reliable outbound webhooks and events to your apps with support for destination types such as Amazon EventBridge, AWS SQS, AWS SNS, GCP Pub/Sub, RabbitMQ, and Kafka.

pdfcpu: A PDF Processing and Manipulation Library — You can validate and optimize PDFs, split them, merge PDFs together, extract elements, and more. The latest version adds support for digital signature validation and improved image handling. GitHub repo.

Centralize HTTP Error Handling in Go — A nice pattern to clean up your HTTP handlers by creating a custom error and wrapper function.

Which Go Router Should I Use? — Alex looks at some popular routing options, citing the pros and cons of each and wrapping it up with a nice decision flowchart and a list of other routing options. We’ve linked to this before but he’s updated it for 2025.

Ian Lance Taylor Has Left Google — One of the most active contributors to Go (and the initial creator of the Go frontend for GCC) has left Google and, in turn, the Go project, though he hopes to return as a contributor one day. As a commenter on the related Hacker News thread (which is packed with all sorts of conjecture) said: “It’s hard...

Building a More Accessible GitHub CLI — GitHub’s CLI tool is powered by Go and the GitHub team shares the challenges faced for making it more accessible (with before-and-after videos) to screen readers and those with special visual requirements in particular. Popular Go library creators Charm make an appearance to lend a hand too.

Practical Patterns for Graceful Shutdowns — Shutting down gracefully can mean the difference between a good user experience with consistent data and angry users (or even just yourself!) with corrupted data. Follow and adapt this five-step approach, and shutting down won’t open you up to issues.

Proposal: Add Bare Metal Support to Go? — Andrea proposes a new 'none' target for the Go compiler to enable freestanding execution without direct OS support. This isn’t exactly new ground – it’s been proposed before – but Go contributor Filippo Valsorda thinks it’s worth serious consideration again due to the opportunities it would open up in micro VMs, firmware, and elsewhere. It's also been...

wget to Wipeout: Malicious Go Modules Fetch Destructive Payload — A cautionary tale of a recent, stealthy supply-chain attack, by way of some malicious Go modules, which saw a single line of code wipe an entire disk clean. As ever, take care over your dependencies.

Organize Your Go Middleware Without Dependencies — Go 1.22 introduced some enhancements to HTTP routing, so now it could make a lot of sense to remove dependencies around routing and handle things like middleware yourself. It doesn't take much code, either.

k6 1.0: A Go-Powered Load Testing Tool — A full-featured, configurable load generation tool that uses the Sobek Go-powered JavaScript engine to support writing test scripts in JavaScript. v1.0 promises stability, first-class TypeScript support, and easier extensibility.

Don't Make These Feature Flag Mistakes — 7 mistakes to avoid, one of which cost a company $440M.

Odin: A Pragmatic C Alternative with a Go Flavor — There’s another new(ish) “data-oriented” language out there with some Go-like features that you may want to try. More details and docs here.

GoVisual: A Pure-Go HTTP Request Visualizer and Debugger — A zero-config HTTP request visualizer and debugger targeted at local Go web app development use cases. Includes middleware tracing and OpenTelemetry integration.

The Draft Go 1.25 Release Notes — We’re still about four months away from the final Go 1.25 release (expected in August) but, as always, the release notes are being worked on in advance and already provide a useful glimpse into what’s coming.

aerc: A Go-Powered Terminal-Based Email Client — Mix a little Pine with a little Vim and tmux and you get this Go-powered email client that supports HTML emails, PGP signing, IMAP/Maildir/SMTP and so on.

✉️ ListMonk 5.0: Self-Hosted Newsletter & Mailing List Manager — If you don’t want to pay to use a hosted newsletter system, how about a one binary Go solution? v5.0 introduces a visual drag-and-drop email builder and template editor. (Homepage.)

Bufstream: Kafka and gRPC for the Modern Age — A drop-in Kafka implementation with up to 8x cost savings over self-managed. See how we do it.

Firebase Brings Its Genkit AI Framework to Go — Genkit is a framework for building AI-powered apps from Google’s Firebase team, though it can be used independently of Google’s APIs. Originally for Node.js, it’s now in beta for Go too.

Using the SIGHUP Signal for Configuration Reloads — The OS can send various ‘signals’ to your Go apps and SIGHUP (“signal hangup”) is one of the more interesting ones. Phuong explains its history, what it’s often used for today, and how to catch and handle it.

This 150-Line Go Program is a Full-On Load Balancer — A code-heavy walkthrough of a round-robin load balancer built solely with the standard library. It’s not production-ready, but the author offers some recommendations for moving in that direction.

Is Your Go Application's Postgres Prepared for Your Next High Traffic Event? — Do you feel like your Postgres database is a black box? Watch Postgres expert Lukas Fittl walk through the latest pganalyze features to tune slow queries, catch regressions, and keep Postgres running at its best in this on-demand video.

Using Differential Coverage for Debugging — Russ shows how to generate and diff coverage profiles from passing and failing tests to spotlight code unique to the failure. It’s not foolproof, but it can dramatically narrow your debugging search space.

A No Nonsense Guide to Go Project Layout — Say ‘no’ to overly complicated package structures, says the author, who shares a set of opinions for keeping things tight and focused with the goal of preventing ‘over complication’ in smaller projects.

Doltgres Beta Launch: A Version Controlled SQL Database — As well as dropping lots of great Go articles on their blog, the folks at DoltHub also develop database software ;-) Doltgres is a Postgres-flavored variant of their SQL database that offers Git-style merging and forking, and it’s all built in Go.

🤖 MCP Go: A Go Implementation of the Model Context Protocol — The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is a rapidly growing way to provide a way for LLMs and AI agent based devtools with access to external services. Why let Pythonistas have all the fun when you could be developing your own MCP servers with Go?

Go Event-Driven: Build Backend Systems That Actually Scale — Join 1000+ developers coding real projects in your IDE. No videos, just hands-on practice. Spring cohort opens soon.

🖼️ ImageProxy 0.12: A Caching Proxy Server and Transformer for Image Files — A long-standing project that provides a way to efficiently host image files while also allowing for basic transformations such as resizing, cropping and rotation. v0.12 is the first release in a few years and updates dependencies and adds a module for Caddy.

GoMud: A MUD (Multi-User Dungeon) Server — An in-development open source dungeon game world and library that handles the main concepts associated with MUDs, like maps, inventory and equipment, day/night cycles, etc, and allows players to connect over Telnet or HTTP.

Preventing Accidental Struct Copies — Go lets you copy structs by value, which can cause subtle bugs—especially with locks like sync.WaitGroup or Mutex. This post digs into how a noCopy trick and go vet’s copylocks checker can catch these issues.

Hunting Zombie Processes in Go and Docker — When spawning processes that in turn spawn other processes, you can run into issues where some unwanted processes stick around as zombies. This post looks at one such situation, how containers made it even messier, and how the zombies ultimately got taken out.

Cheating the Reaper in Go — How far can you push manual memory management in Go despite its garbage collector? Miguel peels back Go’s GC internals to craft a blazing-fast arena allocator in pure Go—with nothing more than unsafe wizardry—and shows exactly when (and how) you can safely outmaneuver the GC’s reaper.

Optimizing Heap Allocations — When an (expected) innocuous code change had a 30% performance hit, it led to an enlightening forensic journey into stack vs heap allocation. Point yourself at this article to gain the value of understanding allocations and escape performance regressions.

Bufstream: Robust Streaming for gRPC — Meet a cloud-first, drop-in Kafka implementation custom-built for go gRPC streams. Stateless, auto-scaling, schema-aware, and up to 8x cheaper than maintaining your own Kafka stack. Read the Jepsen report.

sync.Pool is Not a Silver Bullet — sync.Pool can reduce allocations and GC pressure, but it’s not a drop-in solution for every case. Jens looks at where pooling shines (predictable, short-lived objects) and when it can backfire.