#585 — January 16, 2026
Go Weekly
Go 1.26 Release Candidate 2 Released — Go 1.26 gets a little closer to its final release in a few weeks with a fresh release candidate including several security fixes in areas like archive/zip and Request.ParseForm. "Run it in dev! Run it in prod! File bugs!" says the Go team. The draft release notes remain a good way to get up to speed, as does Anton Zhiyanov’s Go 1.26 interactive tour.
Junyang and Michael for the Go team
💡 Go 1.25.6 and Go 1.24.12 have also been released including the same security fixes as 1.26rc2 above.
Give Us Your Tired, Your Restless, Your Micromanaged, Yearning to Build Freely 🗽 — Fluidstack is hiring across 50+ infrastructure and engineering roles across the country. If you want to drive deployments for frontier labs, experience real autonomy, and build the AI infrastructure our future will rely on, check out all our open positions. 🚀
Fluidstack sponsor
Are Atomic Operations Faster & Better Than a Mutex? It Depends — While atomic operations can be significantly faster than mutexes, that speed comes with trade-offs in complexity and correctness that often make mutexes the better choice.
Benjamin Cane
Writing Mutexes From Scratch in Go — Experimenting with other options to implement locks that are lower level than just relying on sync.Mutex.
Chris Rybicki
Stop Overthinking Struct Pointer and Value Semantics in Go — When creating a struct type, you can face decisions about whether to use value or pointer semantics. Rather than debating this case-by-case, why not establish a convention?
Preslav Rachev
📄 'Losing' 11⁄2 Million Lines of Go – Tim looks at the complexity of adding up-to-date Unicode support to Quamina, a pure Go pattern matching library he’s working on. Tim Bray
📄 Porting MiniJinja to Go with an Agent – MiniJinja is a Rust-powered Jinja2 template engine. Armin Ronacher
📄 Finding and Fixing a 50,000 Goroutine Leak That Nearly Killed Production – Serge spotted a hidden killer goroutine leak that had been growing for six weeks. Serge Skoredin
📄 Racing with Disaster: Data Races in Go John Arundel
🛠 Code & Tools
godump 1.9: 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. v1.9 adds optional field retraction, but other recent releases have added other niceties like diff support, HTML output, and a builder-style API for heavy customization.
Chris Miles
Notify 1.5: Send Notifications to Various Messaging Services — Supports about thirty different services including Discord, AWS SES and SNS, Microsoft Teams, Slack, and Telegram.
Niko Köser
How Teams Add Leverage to Their Kubernetes Environments — If k8s isn’t your product, why treat it like one? Learn what to own, what to outsource, and how to stay in control.
Fairwinds sponsor
libgodc: A Go Runtime for the Sega Dreamcast — The Dreamcast, released in 1999, was Sega’s last truly innovative console (with a whole 16MB of RAM and a 200MHz CPU!) and, amazingly, you can now build things for it with Go, complete with support for goroutines, channels, garbage collection, etc. The project even includes some games as examples, such as a Pong clone. There’s extensive documentation too.
Panagiotis Georgiadis et al.
go-astiav: ffmpeg Bindings for Go — The goal is to provide a more idiomatically Go API for FFmpeg’s various multimedia features. Now supports FFmpeg 8.
Quentin Renard
parse-dmarc: A Lightweight, Self-hosted DMARC Report Parser — DMARC is an email authentication standard used, in part, to prevent email address spoofing. There are numerous services that can collect and collate DMARC reports for you, but this gives you a single binary solution complete with a Vue-powered frontend.
Meysam
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Chroma 2.22 – Pygments-inspired general purpose syntax highlighter in pure Go. There's an online playground if you want to give it a spin (above).
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Warp v1.4 – S3 benchmarking tool supporting concurrent operations, multiple hosts, and distributed testing.
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AWS Lambda for Go v1.52.0 – Libraries, samples and tools that help Go developers build AWS Lambda functions.
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Terratest v0.55.0 – Library for writing automated tests for infrastructure code.
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River 0.30 – Fast & reliable Postgres-powered background jobs system.
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hcloud v2.35.0 – Official Go library for the Hetzner Cloud API.
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quic-go 0.59 – Pure Go QUIC implementation.
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Air 1.64 – Live reload for Go apps.
📢 Elsewhere in the ecosystem
Some other interesting stories in the broader landscape:
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There's a surprisingly large ecosystem of retro Windows users and developers, and both go-legacy-win7 and go-legacy-winxp make it possible to compile Go programs for Windows 7 and Windows XP respectively.
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🤖 Even Linus Torvalds is 'vibe coding' now. He's been using Google's Antigravity tool to create some digital sound effects.
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goscript is a curious, experimental tool that translates Go code to TypeScript at the AST level so you can share algorithms and business logic between your Go backend and TypeScript frontend.
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📘 The Concise TypeScript Book is a short, focused TypeScript guide that's open and free to read.
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Artem Golubin suggests you probably don't need Oh My Zsh.