The one with the big Go 1.25 release

#566 — August 20, 2025

☀️ We're back from a week off – the previous issue is here if you want to check it out again – and we should now be back every week until October at least :-)
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Peter Cooper, your editor

Go Weekly

⭐ Go 1.25 Released — Sadly Go 1.25’s release coincided with my vacation – what luck! Nonetheless, 1.25 is a solid release, focused on fixes, improvements, and tool upgrades, rather than language changes, making it an easy upgrade for most. Here are some of the highlights and further resources to check out:

The final Go 1.25 release notes provide all the details of the release.
A new, experimental garbage collector is available to try, behind the GOEXPERIMENT=greenteagc build-time option.
Anton Zhiyanov's Go 1.25 interactive tour remains a great way to get up to speed with the few language tweaks there are, including WaitGroup.Go(), the v2 JSON package, and the now-generally-available testing/synctest package.
Microsoft has issued a release of its own Go 1.25.0 build and *TinyGo* has a Go 1.25 build too (more on that below).

Dmitri Shuralyov (The Go Team)

Take Control of User Roles and Permissions — As your app grows, hard-coded roles and permissions become messy and slow development. WorkOS RBAC makes it easy to define roles, group permissions, and manage access at scale with simple APIs, a powerful dashboard, and native SSO and SCIM integrations.

WorkOS sponsor

IN BRIEF:

Amazon Web Services has created an 'Advanced Go Driver' for Amazon RDS and Aurora that wraps pgx or the native MySQL driver to provide enhanced functionality, particularly around auth and switchover/failover scenarios.
Embedded Go is a Go toolchain that adapts the Go compiler to target alternative devices including the Raspberry Pi Pico 2 and even the Nintendo 64.
🇬🇧 Jamie Tanna shares a detailed writeup of his experiences at last week's GopherCon UK 2025.

D2: A Declarative Diagramming Tool in Go — If you’re familiar with Mermaid, this is a similar idea but built in Go. It’s a powerful tool, and has become even more so this week with support for ASCII outputs, so you can use your diagrams in even more places. GitHub repo.

Terrastruct

What is the Go Proxy Even Doing? — Go’s module proxy provides stability for developers, but its design can hit upstream servers with redundant clones. Ted shows the logs and explains how he defends his server.

Ted Unangst

📄 From Python to Go: Why We Rewrote Our Ingest Pipeline – They started with Python for faster prototyping but rapidly saw huge gains after shifting to Go. Telemetry Harbor

📄 Understanding Go Error Types: Pointer vs. Value – “The subtle distinction between pointer and value error types can silently break your code.” Fillmore Labs

🛠 Code & Tools

Introducing gomjml: MJML Email Markup for Go Developers — MJML is a framework for writing emails using special, custom HTML tags which then get transformed into safe, responsive HTML that notoriously touchy email clients can handle. MJML’s main implementation is for Node.js, however, but Preslav has built a new, Go-native approach.

Preslav Rachev

TinyGo 0.39: Now with Go 1.25 Support — TinyGo is a popular Go compiler that takes Go to ‘small places’ like embedded systems, microcontrollers and WebAssembly use cases. v0.39 is a bigger release than it sounds as it brings Go 1.25 support.

Ron Evans et al.

How to Boost Your Kubernetes Security with Smart Add-On Management — Learn proven strategies to identify risks, meet compliance, and streamline add-on updates in our K8s security guide.

Fairwinds sponsor

The 5 Best Logging Libraries for Go — An opinionated, but potentially useful, list.

Vadim Korolik (LaunchDarkly)

Go-edlib: String Comparison and Edit-Distance Algorithms — Levenshtein, LCS, Hamming, Damerau levenshtein (OSA and Adjacent transpositions algorithms), Jaro-Winkler, Cosine, and more make an appearance here.

Hugo Bollon

Ginkgo 2.24 – Mature testing framework. A new semantic versioning filter has been added so you can run specs based on version constraints.
Mongo DB Driver 2.3 – The official Go driver for MongoDB. Go 1.19+ is now required, and this is the final release to support MongoDB 4.0.
River 0.24 – Robust job processing system for Go and Postgres.
graphql-go 1.7 – GraphQL server with a focus on ease of use.
Ristretto 2.3 – High performance memory-bound Go cache.
NATS.go 1.45 – Go client for the NATS messaging system.
go-zero 1.9 – Cloud-native Go microservices framework.
golangci-lint 2.4 – A faster way to run Go linters.
Dynamo 2.4 – Expressive DynamoDB library.