Issue #582: Shhh.. Go's getting a 'secret mode' — Go Weekly

#​582 — December 10, 2025

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Your editor, Peter Cooper

Go Weekly

Go Proposal: Secret Mode — Secret mode, set to land in Go 1.26 behind a flag, lets you run a function where, upon completion, the stack (and registers) will be automatically zeroed to ensure sensitive information doesn’t stay in memory longer than necessary. Ideal for cryptography use cases, the API is simple enough that I expect to see it used more widely.

Anton Zhiyanov

💡 The full, precise behavior of secret mode and other 'goroutine bubble' features is still being actively discussed, however.

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IN BRIEF:

• Hajime Hoshi, the creator of the fantastic Ebitengine 2D game engine, reflects on 12 years of building Ebitengine, shares some of the Ebitengine-powered games released in 2025, and lays out some future developments.

• Reddit's /r/golang participants discussed their favorite 'don't do this' lessons learned working with Go over time.

• GoLand 2025.3, the latest version of JetBrains' popular commercial IDE for Go, has been released.

• 🎤 Russ Cox went on the ACM ByteCast podcast to talk about his background, meeting Go co-designer Rob Pike, as well as the role of Go in the modern development landscape.

• GitHub has improved its Dependabot-based dependency graphs for Go projects.

🔥 This Developer Really Doesn't Like Gin — It’s easy to criticize something, but it’s not so easy to put together several thousand words with numerous diagrams, tables, and examples to back up a rant. Even if you disagree with Efron’s opinion, his treatise on why Gin is ‘very bad’ is.. an experience.

Efron Licht

Compressing Embedded Files in Go — If Go won’t do it, you can just do it yourself.

Vincent Bernat

📄 Malicious Go Packages Impersonate Google’s UUID Library Kirill Boychenko (Socket)

📄 Go Optimizations for High Volume Services – Lessons from a Postgres to Elasticsearch pipeline. Julien Singler

📄 Go Escape Analysis and Why My Function Return Worked Bonnie Simon

🛠 Code & Tools

RobotGo 1.0: Native Cross-Platform GUI Automation — A way to control the pointer, keyboard, read the screen, etc. on macOS, Windows, and Linux (X11). A separate paid version adds Wayland support.

V Caesar et al.

Gremlins: A Mutation Testing Tool for Small Go Modules — A different way to put your code, and associated tests, through a stress test with some gremlins mutating your code to see if the tests stand up to scrutiny. It’s early days, but worth checking out for the logo alone! GitHub repo.

Davide Petilli

Meet Agentic Postgres: The Database Built for AI Agents — Spin up Postgres for AI experiments in seconds. Free forever, with forks, vector search, and zero setup.

Tiger Data sponsor

filesql: SQL Driver for CSV, TSV, XLSX Files, and More — Built atop SQLite, filesql provides SQL access to CSV, TSV, LTSV, Parquet, and Excel (XLSX) files from Go.

CHIKAMATSU Naohiro

Kaiju Engine: A 2D and 3D Game Engine in Go — A ‘work in progress’ project to create a game engine in Go that uses Vulkan behind the scenes. It’s still early days, however. GitHub repo.

Brent Farris et al.

gorush 1.20: A Push Notification Server, Built on Gin — Supports APNS (Apple Push Notification Service), Firebase (FCM), and HMS Push Server (Huawei).

Bo-Yi Wu

• 🤖 Crush 0.22+ – Charm's Go-powered coding agent tool continues to get even better with v0.22 introducing the ability to search the Web (using DuckDuckGo) and now supporting tools and MCPs that return images.

• neo4j-go-driver v6.0 – Official Go driver for working with Neo4j databases using the Bolt protocol.

• GoFr 1.50 – The opinionated microservice development framework adds Azure File Storage support.

• parquet-go v0.26.0 – Low-footprint library for reading and writing Parquet files.

• Casbin 3.0 – Open-source access control library for Go projects.

• Lazygit 0.57 – Simple terminal UI for git commands.

• go-github 80.0 – Client library for the GitHub API v3.

• Ebitengine 2.9.5 – The 2D game engine.

• dskDitto 0.1 – Fast duplicate file finder.

• fq 0.16 – Like jq for binary formats.

📢 Elsewhere in the ecosystem

Some other interesting stories in the broader landscape:

• Dolt, a version-controlled relational database built with Go, is now boasting being as fast as MySQL on the Sysbench benchmark.

• Brian 'Beej' Hall, famous for his various guides for things like network programming and Git, has released Beej's Guide to Learning Computer Science. It's high level and more about the mental models and philosophy of problem solving than any actual coding or math.

• 🎧 Microsoft has launched a VS Code Insiders podcast where the VS Code team gets to go "beyond the release notes" and talk about VS Code's features and ecosystem.

• Let's Encrypt is celebrating ten years of generating certificates.

• Want to try and understand how elliptic curve cryptography works? Here's an attempt at boiling it down.