Ian Lance Taylor takes a break from Go

#​554 — May 14, 2025

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🖊️ I'm going to Google I/O next week, so Go Weekly will be taking a break and will return on May 28. If you happen to be at I/O too, say hi if you see an Englishman rambling on about newsletters. I'm intrigued to see if Go gets any presence there.
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Your editor, Peter Cooper

Go Weekly

Ian Lance Taylor Has Left Google — One of the most active contributors to Go (and the initial creator of the Go frontend for GCC) has left Google and, in turn, the Go project, though he hopes to return as a contributor one day. As a commenter on the related Hacker News thread (which is packed with all sorts of conjecture) said: “It’s hard to overstate the amount of service Ian provided to the Go community”

Ian Lance Taylor

New Experimental 'Green Tea' Garbage Collector — A proposal outlining a new span-based, “memory-aware” GC algorithm focused on small objects that improves spatial and temporal locality on modern multi-CPU systems by better exploiting memory topologies and cache hierarchies. Benchmarks are mixed, but it’s early days. You can try it out today with gotip and it’s slated to be an opt-in experiment in Go 1.25.

Knyszek and Clements

Complete Go for Professional Developers — Craft production-grade APIs with Go, the language trusted by tech giants! Connect to Postgres, implement auth, and write tests that matter. Taught by a Twitch ML engineer who solves real problems with Go daily.

Frontend Masters sponsor

Which Go Router Should I Use? — Alex looks at some popular routing options, citing the pros and cons of each and wrapping it up with a nice decision flowchart and a list of other routing options. We’ve linked to this before but he’s updated it for 2025.

Alex Edwards

IN BRIEF:

• 🇬🇧 GopherCon UK takes place this August but its CFP closes this Saturday.

• 🦋 If you use Bluesky at all, someone's put together a 'starter pack' of Go contributors you can follow there.

Centralize HTTP Error Handling in Go — A nice pattern to clean up your HTTP handlers by creating a custom error and wrapper function.

Alexis Bouchez

📄 Using the OpenAI Responses API in Go – A full walkthrough for OpenAI’s latest way to interact with its LLMs. Chris Sotherden

📄 Monitoring a Go App with Prometheus and Grafana Pradumna Saraf and Docker

📄 sync.WaitGroup: Powerful, but Tricky.. Jens Neuse

🛠 Code & Tools

pdfcpu: A PDF Processing and Manipulation Library — You can validate and optimize PDFs, split them, merge PDFs together, extract elements, and more. The latest version adds support for digital signature validation and improved image handling. GitHub repo.

pdfcpu

Outpost: Outbound Webhooks and Event Destinations Infrastructure — A way to add reliable outbound webhooks and events to your apps with support for destination types such as Amazon EventBridge, AWS SQS, AWS SNS, GCP Pub/Sub, RabbitMQ, and Kafka.

Hookdeck

Go Panicked Again? Yeah, Sentry Saw It—and Kept the Receipts — Goroutines are great—until one quietly dies. Sentry catches panics, traces them back, and gives you full context. 👉 Try it free before your next deploy gets weird.

Sentry sponsor

Fx 36.0: A Command-Line JSON Processing Tool — If you’ve got some files full of JSON that you want to slice and dice, Fx is for you. Notably, v36 adds support for streaming JSON and tailing such streams, it’s also much faster and less memory hungry when parsing the largest of JSON files. A solid update for a very handy tool.

Anton Medvedev

Goldmark: A Markdown Parser Written in Go — Pure Go, easy to extend, and CommonMark compliant (which GitHub-Flavored Markdown is based upon). There’s also a WebAssembly powered Goldmark playground you can try.

Yusuke Inuzuka

Compress: Optimized Compression Packages for Go — Covers a variety of compression standards like zstandard, S2, gzip, snappy, and zip.

Klaus Post

UPX 5.0: The 'Ultimate Packer' for EXecutables — Staying on the theme of compression.. UPX is a tool that adds run-time compression and decompression to executables to reduce their size. It’s not Go specific but can work on Go executables as Ben Boyter discovered back in 2019.

Oberhumer, Molnar, and Reiser

• 📊 go-echarts 2.5.4 – Charting and data visualization library that uses Apache ECharts. You can see examples in the docs.

• FerretDB 2.2 – A database that acts like MongoDB but uses Postgres for storage.

• go-github 72.0 – Go client library for accessing the GitHub API v3.

• pgroll 0.12 – Zero-downtime, reversible schema migrations for Postgres.

• purego 0.8.3 – Library for calling C functions from Go without Cgo.

• Buf 1.54 – CLI tool for working with Protocol Buffers.

• 🤖 Go OpenAI 1.40 – An OpenAI API wrapper library.

😎 Did You Know..?

As much as we enjoy making this newsletter, we also publish a handful of others you might not know about. You can see the latest issues of them all directly on their homepages:

💎 Ruby Weekly was our first ever newsletter, and it's still going strong 749 issues later! Unsurprisingly it's for Ruby and Rails enthusiasts.

💛 JavaScript Weekly covers all things JavaScript, but also the JS ecosystem more broadly, including TypeScript, WebAssembly, Vue.js, build tools, and Svelte.

⚛️ Just round the corner from JS is React Status covering, unsurprisingly, the React world and Node Weekly which goes deeper into Node.js, the npm ecosystem, and other server-side JS runtimes like Deno and Bun.

👩‍💻 Frontend Focus covers everything that appears browser-side! CSS, HTML, accessibility, WebGPU, browser updates – it's all in there.

🐘 Last, but not least, Postgres Weekly rounds out the family. It's the smallest newsletter, but always packed with great stuff as the Postgres ecosystem punches above its weight in terms of news and interesting releases.

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Peter Cooper, your editor