When is it OK to panic in Go?

#​548 — April 2, 2025

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Go Weekly

A Guide to Optimizing for High Performance in Go — An in-progress collection of technical articles aimed at helping Go developers write faster, more efficient apps. The initial focus is on common patterns like object pooling, struct field alignment, and using worker pools, with a guide to high-performance networking set to follow soon.

Alexander Stavonin

Goodbye Core Types, Hello Go As We Know and Love It — A look at Go’s evolving type system, revealing how the abstraction of core types (introduced with generics in Go 1.18) complicated otherwise straightforward language features, and how their removal in Go 1.25 is set to simplify both the spec and everyday coding. (Hacker News reactions here.)

Robert Griesemer (Go Core Team)

2X-40X Faster Docker Builds with Blacksmith — With a one-line code change, Blacksmith can make your Docker builds incremental by mounting your Docker layer cache into your GitHub Actions runner. Blacksmith is used by 300+ companies like Ashby, Clerk, and Mintlify.

Blacksmith sponsor

When is it OK to Panic in Go? — One of the Go proverbs is “Don’t panic,” which isn’t just good life advice but also saying not to use panic for normal error handling. Alex explores panic and some times when you should use it.

Alex Edwards

IN BRIEF:

• Go 1.24.2 and 1.23.8 have been released including security fixes to net/http.

• Did you know the Go gopher, as designed by Renée French, is over 25 years old? 11 years ago, Rob Pike and Andrew Gerrand told the story of Go's popular mascot on the Go blog.

• 📈 The latest TIOBE index of programming language popularity is out with Go moving up from 8th to 7th position.

The First Newsletter Dedicated to Product Engineers — Learn strategies and tactics you need to succeed as a product engineer (and build products users love).

PostHog sponsor

📺 Go Concurrency from the Beginning – A nifty 8 minute video quickly touring Go’s concurrency mechanisms using basic examples. Living, Etc.

📄 Building a Real-Time Notification System in Go with Postgres Ravi (Finly)

📄 Interfacing with WebAssembly in Go David Desmarais-Michaud

📄 Building a Network Vulnerability Scanner with Go Rez Moss (Sitepoint)

📄 5 GitHub Actions Every Maintainer Needs to Know Finley and Davis (GitHub)

🛠 Code & Tools

Introducing ls-lint: A File Structure Linter — Billing itself as an ‘extremely fast file and directory name linter’, ls-lint is a Go powered tool for enforcing some structure over a project’s filesystem and naming policies. GitHub repo.

Lucas Löffel

urfave/cli 3.1: A Declarative Way to Build Go CLI Apps — The manual outlines all of the key features, but think shell auto-completion, option parsing, help text, etc.

Jeremy Saenz and Contributors

Revive 1.8: A Faster, Configurable, Flexible Linter for Go — A drop-in replacement of golint that aims to provide a little more structure, configurability, and performance. It’s used by numerous large Go projects and libraries. The README on the GitHub repo explains how it differs to golint.

Minko Gechev

asciigraph: ASCII Line Graph Rendering Library — A longstanding library for rendering basic line graphs in ASCII text, such as at the terminal, all with no dependencies.

Rohit Gupta

Prefixed UUIDs: A Package That Adds Type-Safe Prefixes to UUIDs
Khaja Minhajuddin

• DoltgreSQL 1.51 – Version controlled Postgres-a-like with Git-like functionality.

• Validator 10.26 – Value validations for structs and fields based on tags.

• Buf 1.51 – Tool for working with Protocol Buffers.

• Clickhouse Go 2.34 – Go driver for ClickHouse.

• Colly 2.2 – Go scraper and crawler framework.