The best of the Go newsletter in 2023

#​489 — December 19, 2023

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Go Weekly

The Best of the Go Newsletter in 2023

Welcome to the final issue of 2023! We'll be back on Tuesday, January 9, but before that, we want to take a look back at the most popular items of the year, plus a few bonuses for good measure, and we hope you have a great holiday season!
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Peter Cooper, your editor

Rust vs Go: A Hands-On Comparison — Despite a large number of differences, Rust and Go are frequently compared, often controversially. Someone who is predominantly a Rust developer had another go at the topic by focusing specifically on the practicalities of building a small HTTP service in both languages. It’s not perfect, but fair overall.

Matthias Endler (Shuttle)

Articles comparing Go and Rust were particularly popular this year:

• The Krater team explained why they used Go instead of Rust to build their desktop app.

• Vercel wrote about why they were migrating their Turborepo tool from Go to Rust.

• John Arundel did his own Rust vs Go comparison.

Experimenting with Project Templates — The theme of starting a project continues with a look at the Go team's unveiling of a new experimental tool for creating new projects in Go from predefined templates – something they are continuing to develop into 2024.

Cameron Balahan (Go Team)

How to Start a Go Project in 2023 — The same author wrote a similar piece in 2018 but quite a bit has changed since. While this is aimed at newer Gophers, old hats will likely find a takeaway. “Older guides will mention setting up your $GOPATH. This is something you can comfortably ignore in 2023.”

Ben E. C. Boyter

Organizing a Go Module — It’s common for Go developers to think about how to organize the files and directories in a typical Go project (indeed, the latest Go survey featured this as a main concern of Go devs). The Go project has, however, tended to let the community figure out best practices in this area but it was nice to see them publish something more official.

The Go Team

What’s New in Go 1.20 — This first in a three-part series discussed tweaks to core language features, like interfaces, generics, unsafe, as well as a new slice to array conversion technique. Carl delivered on his promise to write a whole series, too, with part two covering major standard library changes and part three covering the more minor changes there.

Carl M. Johnson

Other new or forthcoming ideas: As well as landing new features in both Go 1.20 and 1.21, both released this year, a variety of proposals and ideas were discussed too including adding coroutines to Go, a big encoding/json update, the future of for loops in Go 1.22, enhanced ServeMux routing and, less seriously, adding a quirky alternate file extension for Go source files.

Implementing a Distributed Key-Value Store in Go — Phil spent months getting up to speed with the Raft consensus algorithm and went into some depth on using it with Go as the core basis for a distributed key-value store.

Phil Eaton

The Smallest Go Binary - 5KB? — I thought this seemed silly at first, especially as it was dated April 1st, but the author had an interesting use case: they wanted to use Go’s assembler but not Go’s runtime..

Over Engineered

🛠 Code & Tools

Conc: Better Structured Concurrency for Go — Go’s concurrency story is good but Conc aims to make it even safer and easier by providing abstractions for various concepts (think pools, concurrent mapping and iteration, and panic catching) and techniques so that goroutine leaks and unhandled panics can become a thing of the past.

Sourcegraph

The Go Libraries That Never Failed Us: 22 Libraries You Need to Know — While there are other lists out there (Awesome Go, for example), this one is tightly curated and only includes libraries they’ve used in production.

Robert Laszczak (Three Dots Labs)

Service Weaver: Google's Framework for Writing Distributed Go Apps — A framework from Google that lets you “write your (Go) application as a modular monolith and deploy it as a set of microservices” to get the best of both worlds, namely: “the development velocity of a monolith, with the scalability, security, and fault-tolerance of microservices.” If you fancy something more technical and less salesy, Robert Grandl has a quick introduction here.

Google Open Source

River: A Fast, Robust Job Queue for Go and Postgres — Introduced just last month, River is an open-source job queue “for building fast, airtight applications” that’s written in Go and takes advantage of generics.

Brandur Leach

betteralign: Make Your Go Programs Use Less Memory.. Maybe — A tool to detect structs that would use less memory if their fields were sorted and to then, optionally, sort such fields.

Dinko Korunic

NilAway: Practical Nil Panic Detection — Nil panics are a common and hard-to-detect issue, but Uber has created a static analysis tool (based on a similar tool from the Java world) that’s easy to setup and integrate with build tools.

Uber