--- title: "The best of the Go newsletter in 2023" publication: "Go Weekly" issue: 489 published_at: "2023-12-19" canonical_url: "https://golangweekly.com/issues/489" --- Plus we're back in three weeks. | #​489 — December 19, 2023 [Unsub](https://golangweekly.com/leave/*|UID|*)|[Web Version](https://golangweekly.com/issues/489) Together with [![Ardan Labs\](https://res.cloudinary.com/cpress/image/upload/e_make_transparent/co_white,e_outline:7,q_auto/uf5bdgdgdbgcbdrzi6r7.png)](https://www.ardanlabs.com/consulting/?utm_source=cooperpress) Go Weekly ![](https://res.cloudinary.com/cpress/image/upload/w_1280,e_sharpen:60,q_auto/zjoj9ab7g6p3ldymbuzx.jpg) 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! ____ _Peter Cooper, your editor_ [Rust vs Go: A Hands-On Comparison](https://www.shuttle.rs/blog/2023/09/27/rust-vs-go-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](https://blog.moonguard.dev/why-golang-instead-of-rust-to-develop-the-krater-desktop-app) to build their desktop app. - Vercel wrote about why they [were migrating their Turborepo tool from Go to Rust](https://vercel.com/blog/turborepo-migration-go-rust). - John Arundel did [his own Rust vs Go comparison](https://bitfieldconsulting.com/golang/rust-vs-go). [![\](https://copm.s3.amazonaws.com/1ea6f5f1.png)](https://www.ardanlabs.com/consulting/?utm_source=cooperpress) [Go! Unlock Your Tech Potential with Ardan Labs Consulting](https://www.ardanlabs.com/consulting/?utm_source=cooperpress) — Struggling with skill gaps, development speed or complex tech challenges? Ardan Labs specializes in Go, Rust, Docker and K8s to accelerate your software development, optimize architecture, and manage tech debt. Let us supercharge your team! Ardan Labs Consulting sponsor [Experimenting with Project Templates](https://go.dev/blog/gonew) — 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](https://boyter.org/posts/how-to-start-go-project-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](https://go.dev/doc/modules/layout) — 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](https://blog.carlmjohnson.net/post/2023/golang-120-language-changes/) — 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. Carlana delivered on her promise to write a whole series, too, with [part two](https://blog.carlana.net/post/2023/golang-120-arenas-errors-responsecontroller/) covering major standard library changes and [part three](https://blog.carlana.net/post/2023/golang-120-minor-features/) covering the more minor changes there. Carlana 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](https://research.swtch.com/coro), [a big `encoding/json` update](https://github.com/golang/go/discussions/63397), the future of [`for` loops in Go 1.22](https://go.dev/blog/loopvar-preview), [enhanced `ServeMux` routing](https://github.com/golang/go/issues/61410) and, less seriously, adding [a quirky alternate file extension for Go source files](https://github.com/golang/go/issues/59968). [Implementing a Distributed Key-Value Store in Go](https://notes.eatonphil.com/2023-05-25-raft.html) — Phil spent months getting up to speed with the [Raft consensus algorithm](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raft_%28algorithm%29) 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?](https://totallygamerjet.hashnode.dev/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](https://github.com/sourcegraph/conc) — 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](https://threedots.tech/post/list-of-recommended-libraries/) — While there are other lists out there ([Awesome Go](https://awesome-go.com/), for example), this one is tightly curated and only includes libraries they’ve used in production. Robert Laszczak (Three Dots Labs) [Got Pair-Phobia? Tuple May Change Your Mind](https://tuple.app?utm_source=cooperpress&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=Messaging_Theme+2&utm_content=Go+Newsletter_Sponsored+Link) — We won't be a 3rd wheel on your 1st pairing date! We get out of the way so pairing magic happens. Free 14-day trial. Tuple sponsor [Service Weaver: Google's Framework for Writing Distributed Go Apps](https://opensource.googleblog.com/2023/03/introducing-service-weaver-framework-for-writing-distributed-applications.html) — 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](https://serviceweaver.dev/blog/quick_intro.html). Google Open Source [River: A Fast, Robust Job Queue for Go and Postgres](https://brandur.org/river) — 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](https://github.com/dkorunic/betteralign) — 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](https://www.uber.com/en-NL/blog/nilaway-practical-nil-panic-detection-for-go/) — 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 📰 Classifieds 💻 Hired makes job hunting easy-instead of chasing recruiters, companies approach you with salary details up front. [Create a free profile now](https://hired.com/join/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=sponsor&utm_campaign=%28b2c%29%28l-all%29%28r-all%29%28cooper-golangweekly%29&utm_content=find-your-next-job). --- 📅 [GopherCon Europe](https://gophercon.eu/) is taking place next February _and_ June in Athens, Greece and Berlin, Germany respectively. Ardan Labs is also [running some Go workshops](https://events.ardanlabs.com/) at the event in Greece next February. --- 🐘 PostgreSQL user? Head over to our sister newsletter [Postgres Weekly](https://postgresweekly.com/) for the latest from the Postgres world every week. 📺 The Top Video [![\](https://res.cloudinary.com/cpress/image/upload/w_1280,e_sharpen:60,q_auto/udezqn3ypbzknpzaelrs.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zC5qBBK9ZaM) ▶[Ten Things I Hate About Go](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zC5qBBK9ZaM) — It seems odd to end on a negative note, but this was the video that got the most clicks! These sorts of things are always popular, for obvious reasons, but Jonathan clearly put some thought into his choices and demonstrated the issues in detail. He also admits to being a big fan of Go, as proven in his [▶️ 10 Reasons I Like the Go Programming Language!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LltEsGFOASY) The rest of his channel is also worth a browse. Jonathan Hall (Boldly Go) Curated by Peter Cooper and [Glenn Goodrich](https://twitter.com/ruprict). [Change your email](https://golangweekly.com/edit_subscription/*|UID|*) [Stop getting this newsletter](https://golangweekly.com/leave/*|UID|*) © Cooper Press Ltd · Fairfield Enterprise Centre, Louth, LN11 0LS, United Kingdom