Bookmarks (137)

Go on the PlayStation 2 — If you like tinkering with consoles and shoe-horning Go into new (or old?) environments, this post is for you. It involves TinyGo, C, and a lot of trial and error.

go-profile: A Port of Brendan Gregg's eBPF profile.py — eBPF opens up a way to do profiling in a faster, more direct way on Linux (details here) and this is an initial incomplete attempt to port a Python-powered eBPF profiler to Go.

gocodewalker: A Way to 'Walk' Directories of Code — If you want to walk through a nested set of directories in a code repo while respecting .gitignore, this is for you.

Physix.go: A Simple Physics Engine for Go — An interesting project from a high school student (who explains the background to this project here) providing basic physics capabilities when using Ebitengine.

Goavatar: Generate Unique, Symmetric Identicons Based on a String — Given a string (like a username, say), this generates very basic icons in a deterministic way that you could use for a little added visual recognition.

golangci-lint v2: A Fast Linter Runner for Go — A tool for running Go code linters (about 100 of them!), quickly, in parallel, with caching, YAML configuration, IDE integration, and more. There are some helpful migration instructions if you’re upgrading from v1.

The Right Way to Do Data Fixtures in Go — If you don’t have a strategy for data fixtures from the start, problems can show up in ways that make testing brittle. Here are some tips to get started on the right foot and prevent the need to fix your fixtures later.

How and Why PlanetScale Built a VM in Go — PlanetScale is a well known cloud based MySQL host that uses the Go-powered Vitess MySQL scaler. This article covers the tale of building a virtual machine in Go to work with the SQL ASTs produced by their SQL parser and how it’s as fast (or sometimes faster) as MySQL’s own C++ approach.

Were Multiple Return Values a Mistake for Go? — An interesting technical post critiquing the effects of one of Go’s earliest design decisions. This is an area where opinions will differ strongly, but the author thinks Go sorely needs to support tuples.

Participle: A Simple Library for Defining Parsers — Provides a straightforward yet idiomatic way to define parsers in Go using a familiar approach of using struct field tags to define a grammar, so if you’ve used encoding/json before, you’re well on your way.

DiceDB: A Reactive, In-Memory Database Optimized for Modern Hardware — A new Go-powered database! Dice is a reactive database where your clients subscribe to receive changes immediately and it seems to take a lot of inspiration from the Redis approach being both in-memory and with simple Redis-like commands. GitHub repo.

golang-set: A Simple, Well-Tested, Generic Set Type — “Until Go has sets built-in…use this.” The latest v2.8 release adds support for Go 1.23’s range-over-func iteration.

doomgeneric: Doom, Ported to Go? — If classic 90s FPS Doom can be ported to JavaScript and made to run inside a PDF, a Go port should be a piece of cake, right? Here’s a little slice of magic involving using the ccgo C-to-Go compiler. Don't get too excited though as it's a limited proof of concept and Linux only, but it's neat to see...

Go Structs and Interfaces Made Simple — An introduction (or refresher) of Go’s core building blocks when it comes to working with data types and structs – an approach that differs somewhat from those favored in object oriented languages like C++ or Java.

TypeScript's Go Port Already Leading to Optimizations for Go — Last week’s big news was about the TypeScript compiler being ported to Go for performance reasons. A neat side effect of such a large project entering our ecosystem is the increased potential for even more performance improvements for Go itself, something that has already begun to occur..

📅 Live Workshop: Build Production-Ready Apps with JavaScript & Go — Join Maximiliano Firtman next week (online or in-person) for a 3-day workshop, learning how to build real-world, fully functional web apps using vanilla JS & Go. Create performant, scalable apps.

Traversal-Resistant File APIs — Among the lesser known new features in recent versions of Go are some ways to improve file system security when end user input might have an impact on file paths your app tries to access, including os.Root, filepath.IsLocal, filepath.EvalSymLinks and filepath.Localize. A must read.

ObjectBox Go 1.9: A Fast, Embedded Database for Go Objects — Store objects in ObjectBox and find them again using powerful queries.

TypeScript's Compiler to Get 10x Faster, Thanks to Go — TypeScript has shaken up the JavaScript ecosystem in recent years with an increasing number of developers relying on its strong typing and added structure. TypeScript’s compiler isn’t particularly fast, though, but the TypeScript team at Microsoft is changing that by porting it to Go!

Why Reimplement TypeScript's Compiler in Go? — Many people have been asking why Microsoft is porting TypeScript’s compiler to Go rather than, say, Rust or C#. TypeScript’s architect Anders Hejlsberg delivered the definitive comment on the matter: Go fit the technical requirements and proved the best high performance language to which to port JavaScript for a variety of reasons.

New Low-Level Tools for Garbage Collection Efficiency — A look at two new features offered by Go 1.24’s garbage collector: runtime.AddCleanup and weak.Pointer. Cleanups are like finalizers, but get around some of their quirks by not resurrecting objects they’re attached to. Weak pointers, meanwhile, let you reference objects without preventing their garbage collection.

Different Ways of Working with SQL Databases in Go — Starting with a simple schema presenting a basic blog system, Alex walks through a variety of approaches from working with raw SQL and database/sql to sqlx, using ORMs, and sqlc.

Building a Secure Session Manager — The stateless nature of requests to a webapp demands some sort of session management, most commonly via a cookie containing a unique ID to identify the user. Mohamed looks at a way to keep this whole process secure.

Using Cursor for Large Projects — If you’ve tried using tools like Cursor to write Go code in larger projects, you’ll have almost certainly run into its limitations. Thierry has some tips for adding a bit of structure to the ghost in the machine.

Sign Up for a Workshop to Get Started Building Go-Powered Decentralized Apps — App builders, Go enthusiasts, tinkerers: come and build on gno․land, a smart contract platform for a freer, fairer world.

RobotGo: Native Cross-Platform GUI Automation — A way to control the pointer, keyboard, read the screen, etc. Combine this with an LLM perhaps.. if you dare?

ghw 0.15.0: A Go Hardware Discovery/Inspection Library — Find out things about the memory, CPU, storage, network support, and similar things about the host computer. Focused on Linux and Windows, with partial macOS support.

Faster Go Maps with Swiss Tables — One of Go’s newest features is a revamped map implementation powered by a new hash table algorithm called Swiss Table that boosts map operations up to 60% faster in microbenchmarks, while reducing memory overhead. Here’s a look at how it works.

sqldef 1.0: Idempotent Schema Management for Databases — A Go-powered CLI tool and WASM library for diffing SQL schemas (demo here). Supports MySQL, Postgres, SQLite and SQL Server. Built by one of Ruby’s core team members, too.

Go Clean Template — Inspired by Uncle Bob’s ‘Clean Code’ principles, this repo attempts to provide a ‘clean architecture template’ for building Go-powered services that are well organized and won’t turn into a mess. You be the judge.

go-git 5.14: An Extensible Git Implementation in Pure Go — “Manipulate git repositories at low level (plumbing) or high level (porcelain), through an idiomatic Go API.” Now requires Go 1.23+.

Gore 0.6: A Full Featured Go REPL Environment — You get all the niceties you’d expect like line editing, history, multi-line input, the ability to import packages, and, in this latest build, gopls-powered code completion too.

The Magic of Small Engineering Teams — How PostHog uses small teams to ship fast and scale at the same time.

Nil Channels in Go — Nil channels seem to baffle many Gophers, so Vishnu went on a quest to figure out why in a particular case. This led him to the wisdom of a new Go proverb: “Init when you split; Nil when you merge.”

Calling Rust from 'Cursed' Go — Cgo is Go’s mechanism for calling external/foreign functions but its performance often causes consternation. Enter purego, a still-in-beta way to make such calls without Cgo.

The Cost of Go's panic and recover — When something goes unexpectedly and critically wrong in a Go program you might use panic to abort things quickly, but did you know you can use recover to manage what happens after a panic? This means you could use it as a sort of control flow mechanism, if you were in a particularly unorthodox mood..

Keep Postgres Maintenance from Slowing Down Your Go App — Secure your spot to learn the proactive maintenance practices that uncover hidden database performance risks, like slow queries, checkpoint behavior, & connection issues, before they escalate.

Tips to Debug Hanging Go Programs — Next time your Go app becomes unresponsive, these tips can help you find the issue by forcing a stack trace or using Delve to attach to the process (or core dump) and revive the program.

How to Manage Tool Dependencies in Go 1.24+ — We’ve touched on the new go tool subcommand a few times before, but this is a bit more usage-focused and includes a nice tip about separating your tools into their own module file.

Testing Concurrent Code with testing/synctest — Concurrency is one of Go’s natural strengths, but testing heavily concurrent programs can be tricky. Go 1.24 introduces a new (though experimental and hidden behind an environment variable) package for testing code involving time or concurrency. The Go team wants you to have a play and send in your feedback.

GoChromecast: Discover Devices and Stream Media to Chromecast Devices — A Go-powered tool that implements the protocol used by Chromecast devices.

gno.land Offers Grants & Bounties for Building Go-Powered Decentralized Apps — App builders, Go enthusiasts, tinkerers: come and build on gno.land, a smart contract platform for a freer, fairer world.

Extensible Wasm Applications with Go — “… the ability to build a WASI reactor and export Go functions to Wasm in Go 1.24 represent a significant step forward for Go’s WebAssembly capabilities. These features empower developers to create more versatile and powerful Go-based Wasm applications …”

godoc.nvim: Fuzzy Search Go's Docs from Neovim — Adds a quick way to search and browse Go documentation from within the Neovim editor.

nativewebp: Native WebP Image Support for Go — WebP is a modern raster graphics format commonly used on the Web and this library lets you work with it (though only its VP8L lossless form, for now) from Go without dependencies.

Minecraft From Scratch: A Simple Go Minecraft Clone — A fun project to replicate Minecraft’s infinite, procedurally-generated navigable landscapes using Go and OpenGL 4.1 (as provided via the go-gl/gl bindings – yes, cgo is required here).

Go 1.24 Released — Finally, after many months of blog posts getting excited about Go 1.24’s new features, the real deal has arrived. It’s a reasonably big release too, including a lot of updates:

We Replaced Our React Frontend with Go and WebAssembly — Even if you wouldn’t want to do this, it’s interesting to read about the experience of a team that has.