2026 and Go 1.26

Hi ,

Welcome to 2026, and welcome back to The Applied Go Weekly Newsletter! Back from the winter break, let's look forward to Go 1.26 and back to the most popular Go libraries in 2025. Oh, and why not philosophize a bit about how Go can replace an operating system?

I hope you had a great start into the new year (if you live by the Gregorian calendar) and have some awesome Go projects waiting for you!

–Christoph

Featured articles

Go 1.26 interactive tour

Play with the new features of Go 1.26 before it is out!

GopherCon 2025: An Operating System in Go - Patricio Whittingslow - YouTube

The title of this talk is a bit misleading: The core topic is not about writing an OS in Go but rather replacing OS dependencies with Go-native code to run Go code on bare-metal systems, specifically microcontrollers. For Patricio Whittingslow, TinyGo's OS replacements make it almost a mini OS in its own regard.

The talk includes some interesting facts: In a test, TinyGo binaries were 3.5 times smaller than Rust binaries. TinyGo also runs free of jitter (ie, in constant time) due to not requiring an OS (FreeRTOS in the case of the study) under the hood (unlike C, MicroPython, or Rust).

The most popular Go dependency is… | Thibaut Rousseau's Blog

The most popular Go dependency is... probably not as interesting as the story about how Thibaut Rousseau used a graph database (and some good ideas about where to look for popularity indicators) to do the analysis.

Podcast corner

Cup o' Go | Go 1.26: 240% better! 🎊 This episode: 340% longer! 🎉 Venn: 100% awesome 👍

...and this Cup o' Go episode: 110% worth listening to. Featuring Arthur Vaverko, chief architect at Venn.

Quote of the Week: Agents are really great at writing Go

Go wasn’t something I gave even the slightest thought even a few months ago, but eventually I played around and found that agents are really great at writing it, and its simple type system makes linting fast.

–

This underscores my (yet largely untested) claim that choosing a programming language (and knowing how to write code in it) still matters in times of AI-assisted coding.

More articles, videos, talks

Go feature: Type-safe error checking

errors.As() doesn't have the nicest UX; errors.AsType() shall change this.

bench package - modernc.org/sqlite-bench - Go Packages

Detailed SQLite driver benchmarks, December 2025 edition.

Go's Bun ORM - alternative to Python's SQLAlchemy | cephei8's site

Is Bun the ORM for Go-converted Pythonistas? Seems it does quite well as a SQLalchemy substitute.

Two concurrency patterns which avoid goroutine leaks

Goroutine leaks are nasty and debugging them can be tedious. Better to avoid them by sticking with safe concurrency patterns.

I'd like to share a comment of u/etherealflaim here about another option: "For the second one, bounded concurrency with a simple semaphore is usually even better. I've tried over and over to make worker pools and pipelines more performant than simple bounded concurrency and so far failed every time. It's also cleaner from a code perspective, so win win."

Stop Overthinking Struct Pointer and Value Semantics in Go · Preslav Rachev

"Should I initializes this struct as a pointer or a value?" This question is overrated, says Preslav Rachev, unless you work on a super-high-performance, large-scale app where every nanosecond counts.

Projects

Libraries

GitHub - RichardKnop/minisql: Embedded single file SQL database written in Golang

modernc.org/sqlite is an automated transpilation of SQLite in Go. Richard Knop went a different route and wrote a SQLite-like, embedded database in Go from scratch.

GitHub - goforj/collection: A fluent, Laravel-inspired Collection library for Go - with chaining, higher-order functions, and expressive data manipulation.

A high-level data flow modeling library.

GitHub - MedUnes/go-kata: A collection of daily coding challenges designed to help you master idiomatic Go through deliberate, repetitive practice.

These Go katas are not for learning Go, according to the author. Rather, experienced Gophers can hone their skills by implementing projects derived from "real production mismatches": goroutine leaks, HTT client hygiene, nil interface traps, and more.

Tools and applications

GitHub - ozansz/xgotop

X-ray your running Go app! (Linux only, as the tool uses eBPF to collect runtime events and metrics.

Winter Madness

A game made with Ebitengine and Tetra3D. Code available at Codeberg.

GitHub - dmarro89/go-dav-os: A 32-bit freestanding OS kernel written in Go, booted via GRUB/Multiboot, with VGA terminal, PS/2 keyboard, IDT/PIC/PIT, a debug shell, a bitmap page frame allocator, and an in-memory filesystem

Now who says you can't build an OS in Go?

GitHub | the-dev-tools/dev-tools: Local-first API testing that goes from HAR file to GitHub Actions in 60 seconds.

Think "Podman with n8n-like workflows".

Completely unrelated to Go

A field guide to sandboxes for AI

In the previous issue, I listed a few options for combining AI and Go. If you feel like jumping right into multi-agent coding projects, do so... but don't neglect security. This article is a great intro to security levels of containers, gVisor, microVMs, and WebAssembly/isolate and an invaluable guide to securing agentic AI.

Tap compare testing for service migration | Redowan's Reflections

How do you rewrite a legacy app in another language? Redowan Denowar describes a workflow konwn as shadow testing (or tap-and-compare testing).

The example used is a Python service ported to Go (which, luckily, makes the article somehow relatable for Gophers), but the workflow itself is language-agnostic.

Small projects, clear scope | Swizec Teller

Swizec Teller on a revolutionary approach to software development: "Hey what if we defined what done looks like before we jump in the code?"