Golang Weekly - A look back at Go's 2024

Go 1.24 Release Candidate 1 Released — This announcement isn’t particularly exciting, but if you want to get ahead of what’s coming in February 2025 with the final Go 1.24 release, the holidays aren't a bad time to have a play. The draft Go 1.24 release notes go into more detail.

Carlos and Michael (Go Team)

Go Protobuf and the New Opaque API — The existing protobuf module is here to stay, but now we get an additional API that provides a more loosely coupled abstraction for working with protobufs without being tied to their underlying in-memory representations. The benefits? Memory efficiency, lazy decoding, and fewer opportunities for bugs.

Michael Stapelberg

Go Beyond Limits with Golang, Rust, Docker & K8s — Struggling with tech challenges? Ardan Labs offers unparalleled consulting in Go, Rust, Docker, and Kubernetes. Enhance your development speed, optimize your architecture, and manage tech debt. Propel your team to new heights with our expertise!

Ardan Labs Consulting sponsor

Benchmarking Different Go SQLite Drivers (Again) — An update of a benchmark we first linked a year ago. As with any benchmark results, maintain a critical eye here, but the author found significant differences between the now eight options (previously seven).

Christoph Vilsmeier

WorkOS: Sell to Enterprises with a Few Lines of Code — The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS, offering flexible, easy-to-use APIs to integrate SSO, SCIM, and FGA in minutes instead of months.

WorkOS sponsor

1. Cogent Core: A New GUI Framework for Go — I was surprised this was by far the most clicked link as news tends to trump frameworks/libraries. Cogent is a “code once, run everywhere” GUI framework aiming to be simpler than Gio and more powerful than Fyne. Cogent’s site itself is built with the framework and compiled to WASM to run on the Web. It remains under active development.

Kai O'Reilly and Randy O'Reilly

2. What's Coming in Go 1.24 — A very recent post with a slide deck teasing what's coming in Go 1.24 early next year. It goes through language, tooling, and standard library changes and some of the more experimental parts. The video of this talk still remains to be released, sadly.

Daniel Martí

3. Interactive Release Notes for Go 1.23 — If you find traditional release notes hard going, this interactive alternative with inline executable code snippets might help you get a grip on 1.23, still the latest major version of Go. Anton also had a similar set of notes for Go 1.22.

Anton Zhiyanov

4. Rust vs Go in 2024? — A perennially popular post from yesteryear was tweaked for 2024 with a comparison of the ‘both awesome’ languages including what they’re both good at, their key differences, and some trade-offs to consider. More recently, however, John has asserted that Rust and Go are better off together than apart.

John Arundel

5. Learning Go in 2024; From Beginner to Senior — Matt brought together six years of bookmarks (and YouTube history) to point to something for everyone hoping to pick up some new Go skills in 2024.

Matt Boyle

6. Why People are 'Angry' Over Go 1.23 Iterators — ‘Angry’ is a little OTT, but there was much robust debate about Go’s proposed new iterator helpers earlier this year. The creator of the Odin language chimed in with his thoughts, opining that Go should stay unapologetically imperative.

Ginger Bill

7. Gomponents 1.0: HTML View Components in Pure Go — We first linked to this back in 2020, and it’s not only still going strong, it hit v1.0 this year. Now a stable, dependency-free HTML component library for your Go projects (there’s also an example app to look through).

Markus Wüstenberg

8. Go Performance from Version 1.0 to 1.22 — Two years ago we enjoyed the author’s Go performance analysis from Go 1.2 to 1.18. This was an update taking things from Go 1.0 through to 1.22 (the latest version back in April).

Ben Hoyt