Issue #591: Ways to dramatically reduce Go binary size — Go Weekly

#​591 — February 27, 2026

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Go Weekly

Bubble Tea, Lip Gloss, and Bubbles v2 — The Charm ecosystem of TUI tooling has taken a synchronized leap up to version 2. Bubble Tea v2 includes the ‘Cursed Renderer’, an all-new, faster and more efficient renderer that will also benefit Wish users. Lip Gloss 2.0 brings yet more style to your TUIs, and Bubbles 2.0 gets a DX overhaul, particularly in its color API. If you’re a TUI developer, you really are charmed this week.

Christian Rocha (Charm)

💡 Upgrade guides are available for those making the move from v1 to v2.

Go App: Cloud Infrastructure from Startup to Scale — Deploy and scale a real Go app on AWS. Start fast with containers and App Runner, then grow into CI/CD, Terraform, ECS, and production-ready infrastructure.

Frontend Masters sponsor

How Datadog Reduced the Size of Its Go Binaries by Up to 77% — A valuable walkthrough of three Go-specific techniques: import graph pruning, re-enabling method dead code elimination, and a surprising linker quirk triggered by the plugin package. This post is packed with things worth knowing about.

Pierre Gimalac (Datadog)

IN BRIEF:

• The proposal for adding generic methods to Go has now been officially accepted.

• Go 1.26.1 and 1.25.8 have been pre-announced and are due to be released next Tuesday, March 3, including fixes for four security vulnerabilities.

• JetBrains has released a set of 'modern Go guidelines' for coding agents to use (explained here), but you can just as easily read them for yourself.

• wasm2go is an experiment to create a WebAssembly to Go transpiler.

Turn Dependabot Off — Alert fatigue is real, so you want your tools to produce informative, actionable notifications. For Go in particular, Filipo suggests replacing GitHub’s Dependabot with another vulnerability scanner that provides proper filtering and less noise.

Filippo Valsorda

How Netflix Improved Reliability with Go and Temporal — Read the case study on how Netflix replaced complex orchestration with code-first workflows using Temporal.

Temporal Technologies sponsor

📄 Understanding the Go Runtime: The Memory Allocator Jesús Espino

📄 No Temporary Variables Needed for Pointers in Go 1.26 – Thanks to new(expr) Paweł Grzybek

📄 What Canceled my Go Context? Redowan Delowar

🛠 Code & Tools

witr (Why Is This Running?) — A fantastic tool to help you figure out how and why a process is running on your system. You can specify a process name, PID, or even just a TCP port and see what’s going on, or enter a TUI mode that lets you browse all your running processes.

Pranshu Parmar

gotreesitter: A Pure Go Tree-sitter Runtime — Tree-sitter is a widely used parser generator and incremental parsing library. gotreesitter, a pure Go port, loads the same parse table format that Tree-sitter’s C runtime uses and supports 209 grammars out of the box.

Oscar Villavicencio

Fault: HTTP Middleware to Inject Faults into a Service — Standard Go HTTP middleware to reject incoming requests, respond with errors, add latency, etc. as a way for testing failure scenarios.

Sean Lingren

finish: Add Graceful Shutdowns to Go's HTTP Server — Uses http.Server’s Shutdown method, is customizable (signals, logging, timeouts), and can handle multiple servers. Last mentioned seven years ago(!) but it’s just been updated for Go 1.18+.

Paul Seidemann

• purego 0.10 – Call C functions without cgo. Now supports more architectures.

• 🤖 Crush 0.46 – Charm's TUI-based AI coding assistant adds Sonnet 4.6.

• graphql-go 1.9 – Standards compliant GraphQL library and server.

• 📊 go-echarts 2.7 – ECharts-powered chart generation library.

• go-git 5.17 – Git implementation written in pure Go.

• Tempest 1.6 – Create fast apps for Discord with Go.

• Sarama 1.47 – Go client library for Apache Kafka.

• GoReleaser 2.14

📢 Elsewhere in the ecosystem

• ssh snakes.run will dump you into a live, multiplayer snake game at the terminal, and it's built using Go, Wish, and Bubble Tea. This post explains how it works and was put together, including a look into optimizations made to reduce the bandwidth required to service a large number of players.

• Andrew Nesbitt shares some useful pointers on Git's 'magic' files including .gitignore, .gitmessage, and other files that affect Git's behavior.

• 🕹️ I enjoyed watching ▶️ a developer explain how he created a Quake 2-style FPS in 64 kilobytes. If you'd rather play it, it's here (Windows only).

• GitHub's CodeQL static analysis engine has added Go 1.26 support.

• A list of little, fun programming languages.