One of my engineering highlights was Russ reviewing a few of my contributions to Golang (to the core http library). He's a super cool and nice guy. I don't really write that much Go anymore, but it was a fun & cute language when it first came out.
I love how proactive the crypto team is about post quantum. They released https://pkg.go.dev/crypto/mldsa. The lead maintainer Filippo Valsorda wrote a nice piece here[1] to urge the tech world to start deploying good enough versions of post quantum crypto.
While I'm highly sympathetic to competing priorities crowding out movement to pq cryptography. At the same time it's not sudden at all. It's been 10 years since nist first said "move shit over"?
"bold-faced lie" and "bald-faced lie" are both valid expressions. The original expression is "bare-faced lie" but they're all pretty similar to each other.
Unfortunately for people SELECTing UUIDs out of a DB directly into a uuid struct, the built-in uuid structs don't implement the necessary interface for that, so you'll have to continue using the google package, or a plain string.
The database/sql package gained native support[1] for the uuid.UUID type so it will Just Work even without the methods. This probably should have been mentioned in the release notes and database/sql package docs.
Repeating the package name is fine if it's exactly the same name (modulo capitalization) and there's nothing better to name the type anyway. The style issue would arise with e.g. uuid.UUIDVersion, which should just be named uuid.Version. There used to be a gopls lint that would flag names like uuid.UUID but it got relaxed awhile ago.
> First, generic methods are now supported
> Generic functions can now be used without explicit type arguments
Great! This was an ergonomic code issue I hit when trying to create a universal handler/controller generic that could hydrate/populate function arguments (from a request body) without having an actual copy of the arguments: https://github.com/xeoncross/mid/blob/main/handler.go#L12
I love these release notes but I really wish they would add syntax highlighting to the Go blog. I'm always a little bit surprised/disappointed whenever I land on a go.dev link since I know the code will be just a little harder to visually parse than it needs to be.
There's a reason for this. Rob Pike was asked about it and said that syntax highlighting reminds him of the bright colors of children's toys and he personally disables it so that he can focus on the text.
I don't know why it's still like that but that's the original reasoning.
> Syntax highlighting is juvenile. When I was a child, I was taught
arithmetic using colored rods
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuisenaire_rods). I grew up and today I
use monochromatic numerals.
The reason traffic lights are colored is because they are showing distinct states of the same thing and the color is the means of differentiating.
Same for transit maps: different routes are colored to distinguish them from other routes, which is especially useful if they overlap.
But that’s not what syntax highlighting does.
The equivalent of your examples would be to not highlight the syntax at all, but only use color coding to distinguish variables.
The equivalent of how syntax highlighting currently works for your examples would be if the light fixture was one color, and the light pole was another, but then all the actual lights were the same color.
I actually think highlighting only the variables with distinct colors could be extremely valuable. Would certainly help avoid mistakes with nested i/j loop counters.
Edit to add: come to think of it, it would have been even more valuable in Go, until recently anyway. The variable color coding would expose the common loop variable instance bugs, because a programmer would be instantly puzzled by the unexpected coloring.
That does exist, it's called semantic highlighting.
In any case, my analogy was not perfect, but neither was Russ's! The point is it's totally normal and not "childish" to use colours to help distinguish things. Traffic lights do not technically need colours (you can use the position of the lights - I assume that's what badly colourblind people do). Nor do transit maps technically need colours - you could just label the lines, or use patterns.
That makes sense as a personal preference for him, but it's odd for that to still be the company/project stance. Like, surely he knows he's the minority for not wanting highlighting?
that's an extremely odd explanation and it makes me think that he has some hidden PTSD. it's also insane that one person's preference trumps the rest of the world's.
I understand and respect this position. I think syntax highlighting
is a highly subjective matter, bordering on personal preference with regard to shell interactions, editor configurations, bindings, shortcuts, snippets, and the like. It's also... insignificant somehow, like quibbles over formatting rules that Go settled once and for all with `go fmt`.
I often prefer not to enable syntax highlighting just for color. Occasionally I'd choose some minimal theme that only highlights string literals and keywords. So it has two or three colors. But some of the color schemes I see are a festival of lights where every special element of syntax has its own color.
I don't understand how that is supposed to help me parse anything and why the rules are complex. The `range` keyword needs to be purple, and `chan` must be navy blue. Why exactly? And every site has a different color scheme? There is no consensus, and there shouldn't be.
For a serious community-driven project like Go, dealing with the question of syntax highlighting is strange. The creators deliberately avoided the questions of IDEs and editors for Go, leaving them to the community. I think the same principle applies here.
> Second, a key in a struct literal may now be any valid field selector for the struct type, allowing fields in nested or embedded structs to be initialized directly
It's been a while since I've written more than anything trivial in golang, but this seems like a big deal to me. As in, I can define a struct that is consistent and reusable in other structs
It will be very nice working with code generators like oapi-codegen that can generate either nested structs or very unwieldy struct names. So big in that context, but like you said just a nice qol improvement most of the time.
You might want to follow this proposal, if you aren't already. It's the most recent one, and it's supported by quite a few “core members” of the Go Team. I don't think it'll land in 1.28, but I like the fact that it's still a feature that's being actively discussed.
This is only a small piece of the story for what people say when they want tagged unions. Without all of the ancillary support in the language, like exhaustive pattern matching, it really doesn't count.
That is a LOT of code (very ugly code, I would add) that could be replaced by `type Float = float32 | float64` in a language with actual support for union types.
Tagged unions are not union types. A union type is a supertype for any arbitrary collection of types, but a tagged union aka sum type is a single type with multiple data constructors, and does not require subtyping to be implemented.
The C++ committee said the same thing, and gave us std::variant. They are painful to work with and do not really deliver most of the benefits people want.
Go is extremely easy to pickup. If you know any language you probably know Go already for the most part (channels notwithstanding).
I wouldn't say it is a "beautiful" language however. Though that is in the eye of the beholder, I don't think the Go designers were even really going for beauty.
They were going for readability. You can make some impossible to read code with C++ because the programmer was too clever, and the designers of golang wanted to avoid that.
Agreed. I've recently translated a pangram generator project written in Rust [1] leveraging SIMD to do the same in Go [2] to see how it fairs in terms of speed - the results are pretty close. In my local machine I'm getting ~3GHz in Rust vs ~2.4GHz in Go, which I think is really impressive.
I'm so glad the new uuid package landed - it's overdue but a very welcome addition! I've already replaced github.com/google/uuid with `uuid` in several projects
I like to imagine that one day we'll have a language that launched with all the features languages eventually add. The whole ecosystem of packages would be built on them instead of a legacy of more primitive language feature sets.
I mean one thing frontier models are really good at is porting code with pretty low level of supervision. Provided there are enough fans porting packages from other ecosystems should not be a big challenge.
Used to code primarily in Java. Now my app stack is about 80% Go. I love that it enables lightweight application development. Glad to see the platform evolving with a focus on resource efficiency.
I love Go because even minor versions deliver great value like this. The struct literal inits and generic methods are great conveniences to clean up clumsy boilerplate.
Not to mention it’s just a dream language to work with , especially when building concurrent applications. I love engaging all of my cores. And memory is so expensive nowadays
Minor versions are basically major versions for Go. They’ll “never” create a Go v2 because they prioritise maintaining backwards compatibility as a language feature, thus following semver rules, no majors.
Wasn't Go supposed to be "simple"? I remember how Go advocates used to boast about not having generics and now it almost seems like Go is trying to become some sort of C# or Java Frankenstein. I'm not even trying to badmouth Golang - just legitimately confused.
> almost seems like Go is trying to become some sort of C# or Java Frankenstein
The original Go team was trying to avoid this:
"Java, JavaScript (ECMAScript), Typescript, C#, C++, Hack (PHP), and more [...] actively borrow features from one another. They are converging into a single huge language." [0]
That team has since moved on, and now Go has begun to join that convergence.
The problem is that most programmers seem to want to write Java, more-or-less. New, simpler languages come along, but once they get popular, the pressure is on to turn them into Java-likes. It happened to Python and now it’s happening to Go. It takes a strong will for language maintainers to say “no”, and their language will suffer in popularity as a result - see, for example, Ruby.
I would argue that languages like Java (C#, Kotlin, etc.) strike a very good compromise between modeling ability and comprehension, which is why they are popular and people gravitate toward them.
You can have more complex languages like Scala that provide stronger modeling ability, but at the cost of complexity. Golang started off as extremely naive/simplistic, and is now converging in some ways. But it still has a ways to go: no generics on interfaces, no unions/ADTs, no pattern matching, no proper enums, error handling leaves much to be desired, and much more.
Not mentioned: Floating-point parsing and formatting now uses Russ Cox's uscale algorithm.
https://research.swtch.com/fp
https://github.com/golang/go/blob/go1.27.0/src/internal/strc...
I’m so happy Russ still contributes even though he isn’t lead anymore. I always enjoy reading his blog posts
One of my engineering highlights was Russ reviewing a few of my contributions to Golang (to the core http library). He's a super cool and nice guy. I don't really write that much Go anymore, but it was a fun & cute language when it first came out.
I love how proactive the crypto team is about post quantum. They released https://pkg.go.dev/crypto/mldsa. The lead maintainer Filippo Valsorda wrote a nice piece here[1] to urge the tech world to start deploying good enough versions of post quantum crypto.
[1] https://words.filippo.io/crqc-timeline/
While I'm highly sympathetic to competing priorities crowding out movement to pq cryptography. At the same time it's not sudden at all. It's been 10 years since nist first said "move shit over"?
Yeah the deadline to move everything is drawing near I am actually not impressed by how fast things are going but all progress is good.
Yes, and at that time the answer was "move over where?" now it's 2026 and x-wing is a draft still
Ah. This is a bold faced lie. There were plenty of options in 2016. Nist released final candidates in 2024 and published the candidates this year.
ssh (as noted in tfa) has had pq defaults since 2022.
In case you wanted to know, the expression is actually "bald-faced lie", i.e. unmasked, shameless.
"bold-faced lie" and "bald-faced lie" are both valid expressions. The original expression is "bare-faced lie" but they're all pretty similar to each other.
They are also lying, it is an Italics-Faced lie... thank you, I will see myself out. =3
Calling it a lie is pretty heavy.
The .NET team have been similarly busy on post-quantum lately, it completely dominated the .NET API reviews for the dotnet 11 release.
It seems there's a big push happening behind the scenes.
US Government is starting to push hard so code first needs to support it.
Ok, but when is it coming to our web browsers and email clients?
I don't know about mail clients, but it's in most web browsers already.
Brace for a wave of drive-by pull-requests swapping google/uuid [1] out for the now-standard uuid package [2].
Kubernetes project will be the first one [3] I guarantee it.
[1] https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/google/uuid
[2] https://go.dev/pkg/uuid
[3] https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/blob/2220c3853a2402...
[4] https://github.com/google/uuid/issues/221
Unfortunately for people SELECTing UUIDs out of a DB directly into a uuid struct, the built-in uuid structs don't implement the necessary interface for that, so you'll have to continue using the google package, or a plain string.
The database/sql package gained native support[1] for the uuid.UUID type so it will Just Work even without the methods. This probably should have been mentioned in the release notes and database/sql package docs.
[1] https://cs.opensource.google/go/go/+/refs/tags/go1.27.0:src/...
Doesn’t the type name uuid.UUID violate go’s style guide for type naming? I seem to recall a fairly specific prohibition on stutter-types.
Repeating the package name is fine if it's exactly the same name (modulo capitalization) and there's nothing better to name the type anyway. The style issue would arise with e.g. uuid.UUIDVersion, which should just be named uuid.Version. There used to be a gopls lint that would flag names like uuid.UUID but it got relaxed awhile ago.
No. What else could it reasonably be named? Hard to imagine.
The rule has always been intended to cover types that have another word in them but still choose to pointlessly repeat the package name.
`uuid.UUIDGenerator` is a hypothetical example of the anti-pattern that would instead be better named as `uuid.Generator`.
Or just a number (128-bit).
Oooof… well played go team, well played.
will 'go fix' take care of this?
> First, generic methods are now supported > Generic functions can now be used without explicit type arguments
Great! This was an ergonomic code issue I hit when trying to create a universal handler/controller generic that could hydrate/populate function arguments (from a request body) without having an actual copy of the arguments: https://github.com/xeoncross/mid/blob/main/handler.go#L12
Neat, stealing this.
I wrote a blog on it if you're interested: https://xeoncross.com/2026/better_go_handlers.html
I love these release notes but I really wish they would add syntax highlighting to the Go blog. I'm always a little bit surprised/disappointed whenever I land on a go.dev link since I know the code will be just a little harder to visually parse than it needs to be.
There's a reason for this. Rob Pike was asked about it and said that syntax highlighting reminds him of the bright colors of children's toys and he personally disables it so that he can focus on the text.
I don't know why it's still like that but that's the original reasoning.
> Syntax highlighting is juvenile. When I was a child, I was taught arithmetic using colored rods (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuisenaire_rods). I grew up and today I use monochromatic numerals.
https://groups.google.com/g/golang-nuts/c/hJHCAaiL0so/m/kG3B...
That must be why traffic lights and electrical wires and transit maps are all black and white...
That’s an interesting point.
The reason traffic lights are colored is because they are showing distinct states of the same thing and the color is the means of differentiating.
Same for transit maps: different routes are colored to distinguish them from other routes, which is especially useful if they overlap.
But that’s not what syntax highlighting does.
The equivalent of your examples would be to not highlight the syntax at all, but only use color coding to distinguish variables.
The equivalent of how syntax highlighting currently works for your examples would be if the light fixture was one color, and the light pole was another, but then all the actual lights were the same color.
I actually think highlighting only the variables with distinct colors could be extremely valuable. Would certainly help avoid mistakes with nested i/j loop counters.
Edit to add: come to think of it, it would have been even more valuable in Go, until recently anyway. The variable color coding would expose the common loop variable instance bugs, because a programmer would be instantly puzzled by the unexpected coloring.
That does exist, it's called semantic highlighting.
In any case, my analogy was not perfect, but neither was Russ's! The point is it's totally normal and not "childish" to use colours to help distinguish things. Traffic lights do not technically need colours (you can use the position of the lights - I assume that's what badly colourblind people do). Nor do transit maps technically need colours - you could just label the lines, or use patterns.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/gywst/1407078279
It's completely absurd to say that colours are childish because they can help children.
What is childish is holding up one guy's editor preferences as a religious sacrament when 99.9% of your readers have different preferences.
That makes sense as a personal preference for him, but it's odd for that to still be the company/project stance. Like, surely he knows he's the minority for not wanting highlighting?
Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.
that's an extremely odd explanation and it makes me think that he has some hidden PTSD. it's also insane that one person's preference trumps the rest of the world's.
He also doesn't capitalize his sentences.
Welcome to Go as a project.
Child hood trauma led to if err != nil and now the rest of us get to share that trauma? Makes slight sense I guess.
I understand and respect this position. I think syntax highlighting is a highly subjective matter, bordering on personal preference with regard to shell interactions, editor configurations, bindings, shortcuts, snippets, and the like. It's also... insignificant somehow, like quibbles over formatting rules that Go settled once and for all with `go fmt`.
I often prefer not to enable syntax highlighting just for color. Occasionally I'd choose some minimal theme that only highlights string literals and keywords. So it has two or three colors. But some of the color schemes I see are a festival of lights where every special element of syntax has its own color. I don't understand how that is supposed to help me parse anything and why the rules are complex. The `range` keyword needs to be purple, and `chan` must be navy blue. Why exactly? And every site has a different color scheme? There is no consensus, and there shouldn't be.
For a serious community-driven project like Go, dealing with the question of syntax highlighting is strange. The creators deliberately avoided the questions of IDEs and editors for Go, leaving them to the community. I think the same principle applies here.
I just have a tampermonkey profile for go.dev to fix that for me.
> Second, a key in a struct literal may now be any valid field selector for the struct type, allowing fields in nested or embedded structs to be initialized directly
It's been a while since I've written more than anything trivial in golang, but this seems like a big deal to me. As in, I can define a struct that is consistent and reusable in other structs
This will shorten many test files!
This is quite a QoL issue, but is it big? Nothing changes from functional point of view.
It will be very nice working with code generators like oapi-codegen that can generate either nested structs or very unwieldy struct names. So big in that context, but like you said just a nice qol improvement most of the time.
This makes me want to find a side project for an excuse to give Go another try (I last used it professionally pre-generics).
I do still wish it had discriminated unions (algebraic data types) and some better error handling ergonomics.
Re unions:
https://github.com/golang/go/issues/76920
You might want to follow this proposal, if you aren't already. It's the most recent one, and it's supported by quite a few “core members” of the Go Team. I don't think it'll land in 1.28, but I like the fact that it's still a feature that's being actively discussed.
Tagged unions can be implemented in user code, you dont actually need language support to use them.
https://github.com/splizard/tagged
This is only a small piece of the story for what people say when they want tagged unions. Without all of the ancillary support in the language, like exhaustive pattern matching, it really doesn't count.
You can also add support for exhaustive switches on tags.
That is a LOT of code (very ugly code, I would add) that could be replaced by `type Float = float32 | float64` in a language with actual support for union types.
Tagged unions are not union types. A union type is a supertype for any arbitrary collection of types, but a tagged union aka sum type is a single type with multiple data constructors, and does not require subtyping to be implemented.
The C++ committee said the same thing, and gave us std::variant. They are painful to work with and do not really deliver most of the benefits people want.
Do it. It is just a beautiful language to write and much simpler to pickup than many others. I am a fan boy of course but I love Go.
Go is extremely easy to pickup. If you know any language you probably know Go already for the most part (channels notwithstanding).
I wouldn't say it is a "beautiful" language however. Though that is in the eye of the beholder, I don't think the Go designers were even really going for beauty.
They were going for readability. You can make some impossible to read code with C++ because the programmer was too clever, and the designers of golang wanted to avoid that.
The SIMD stuff is incredible. I have been having lots of fun with it. You can use LLMs as a scalar to SIMD transpiler, it works amazingly well.
Sure a SIMD expert writing assembly can probably do a better job than an LLM using these new intrinsics, but it’s still massively faster.
Agreed. I've recently translated a pangram generator project written in Rust [1] leveraging SIMD to do the same in Go [2] to see how it fairs in terms of speed - the results are pretty close. In my local machine I'm getting ~3GHz in Rust vs ~2.4GHz in Go, which I think is really impressive.
[1]: https://github.com/tuzz/pangram-machine
[2]: https://github.com/nkanaev/pangram-machine-go
I'm so glad the new uuid package landed - it's overdue but a very welcome addition! I've already replaced github.com/google/uuid with `uuid` in several projects
I really want to like Go, but I can't stand looking at Go code. The error handling is such a turn off.
Why would you say something so controversial yet so brave?
Not that I like go at all but because of it my C++ is starting to look like it as I am returning tuples of [result, error].
I try to avoid exceptions, is there any better ways? (Variant looks a bit more complicated but could be a totally OK alternative)
Personally I feel go has many issues and is ugly as hell but the error handling is really the least of my worries.
FYI golangci-lint and gopls are both broken if you try using generic methods.
Broken how? Please report an issue. The latest gopls should support generic methods.
Ah my bad gopls is fine; I forgot to run
after upgrading Go itself.Thank you for the headsup!
Every release CPU load becomes a bit lower. Love it :)
Keeping priorities right!
Full release notes: https://go.dev/doc/go1.27
Nice additions to go.
I like to imagine that one day we'll have a language that launched with all the features languages eventually add. The whole ecosystem of packages would be built on them instead of a legacy of more primitive language feature sets.
I don’t think launching Go today would have been better than 15 years ago.
Standard ML is a perfect programming language from the 90s. It unfortunately does not have a great eco system of packages.
I mean one thing frontier models are really good at is porting code with pretty low level of supervision. Provided there are enough fans porting packages from other ecosystems should not be a big challenge.
Obligatory XKCD reference:
https://xkcd.com/927/
Used to code primarily in Java. Now my app stack is about 80% Go. I love that it enables lightweight application development. Glad to see the platform evolving with a focus on resource efficiency.
New JSON is amazing, and SIMD will be big for json, audio/video etc.
I have been waiting for generic methods and can't wait to use them!
The `go fix` modernisers are also great, have already run them in several repos.
does it have goroutine termination, i recently found out you need a runtime patch for it
I love Go because even minor versions deliver great value like this. The struct literal inits and generic methods are great conveniences to clean up clumsy boilerplate.
Not to mention it’s just a dream language to work with , especially when building concurrent applications. I love engaging all of my cores. And memory is so expensive nowadays
Minor versions are basically major versions for Go. They’ll “never” create a Go v2 because they prioritise maintaining backwards compatibility as a language feature, thus following semver rules, no majors.
true that, but we get a couple of these a year it seems, so their overall velocity is excellent, and without breaking anything. a dream language.
I have recently been spending time learning go, really really liking the language, awesome standard lib, excellent tooling and great experience.
It sounds like the dumbest thing in the world, but I love the import system auto-adding stuff inside of vscode when I need it. just slick.
Go - the language no one likes, but frankly everyone needs.
Python is already the language everyone needs.
Quarterly reminder that Go still exists.
I can imagine using it for simple web stuff. E.g. its perfect for something like Forgejo. But yeah... Seems like the world has moved on mostly.
A large portion of the DevOps/Platform Engineering world uses Go.
Wait generics? What changed? Why is golang accepting of generics now?
They landed half a decade ago...
There are some details here about the history of how generics finally came to Go: https://golang.design/under-the-hood/en/part2lang/ch08generi...
The tl;dr boils down to a combination of valuing both compilation speed and execution speed.
Wasn't Go supposed to be "simple"? I remember how Go advocates used to boast about not having generics and now it almost seems like Go is trying to become some sort of C# or Java Frankenstein. I'm not even trying to badmouth Golang - just legitimately confused.
> almost seems like Go is trying to become some sort of C# or Java Frankenstein
The original Go team was trying to avoid this:
"Java, JavaScript (ECMAScript), Typescript, C#, C++, Hack (PHP), and more [...] actively borrow features from one another. They are converging into a single huge language." [0]
That team has since moved on, and now Go has begun to join that convergence.
The problem is that most programmers seem to want to write Java, more-or-less. New, simpler languages come along, but once they get popular, the pressure is on to turn them into Java-likes. It happened to Python and now it’s happening to Go. It takes a strong will for language maintainers to say “no”, and their language will suffer in popularity as a result - see, for example, Ruby.
[0] https://go.dev/talks/2015/simplicity-is-complicated.slide#5
I would argue that languages like Java (C#, Kotlin, etc.) strike a very good compromise between modeling ability and comprehension, which is why they are popular and people gravitate toward them.
You can have more complex languages like Scala that provide stronger modeling ability, but at the cost of complexity. Golang started off as extremely naive/simplistic, and is now converging in some ways. But it still has a ways to go: no generics on interfaces, no unions/ADTs, no pattern matching, no proper enums, error handling leaves much to be desired, and much more.
Go genetics are still incredibly simple compared to languages with a rich type system.
A problem was so many others were screaming about the lack of generics, as though there were not other language options that provided them.