Golang Weekly Issue 581: December 3, 2025

#581 — December 3, 2025

Together with

Getting Started with Go on the Nintendo 64 — EmbeddedGo is a fork of the standard Go compiler that adds support for bare-metal compilation targeting numerous devices, now including the nearly 30 year old Nintendo 64 console. What a fantastic experiment!

Timur Çelik

Bots Abuse Free Trials. WorkOS Radar Stops Them — Free trials attract growth, but they also invite abuse. Cursor uses WorkOS Radar to detect fake accounts in real time through device fingerprinting and behavioral signals, blocking fraud before it drains compute or disrupts real users.

WorkOS sponsor

The Type-Safe Error Checking Proposal — Anton continues his look at accepted language proposals that will arrive in future versions of Go. This time, it’s errors.AsType, a modern, type-safe alternative to errors.As arriving in Go 1.26.

Anton Zhiyanov

💡 Anton has also taken a look at Go 1.26's enhancements to goroutine metrics.

IN BRIEF:

Go 1.25.5 and 1.24.11 have both been released. They're minor point releases including two security fixes in crypto/x509.
Earlier this year, Microsoft began porting the TypeScript compiler to Go – now they have a progress update on how it's going noting "TypeScript 7 often sees close to a 10x speedup over the 6.0 compiler on full builds!"

Modernizing Reddit's Backend Infrastructure (with Go) — Reddit’s system was entirely built on a handful of Python-powered services but in 2024 they began migrating to Go, with the commenting system (the biggest and most heavily used system) now entirely moved over. Here’s a look at how they did it and what they learned along the way.

Katie Shannon (Reddit)

Reddit Discusses: Why are Interfaces Implicit? — One user asks “Why are interface implementations implicit? It makes it so much harder to see which structs implement which interfaces” which leads to lots of discussion, as you might imagine.

Tiger Lake: Unified Real-Time Architecture for Go Systems — Tiger Lake bridges Postgres and your lakehouse for continuous data flow. Power dashboards, monitoring, and agentic systems with live, contextual data in one Postgres-native platform.

Tiger Data sponsor

📄 'Re-exec' Testing Go Subprocesses – An alternative approach to testing Go code that spawns subprocesses. Redowan Delowar

📄 Go Still Supports Building Non-Module Programs with GOPATH Chris Siebenmann

📄 Avoiding Splintered Failure Modes in Go Redowan Delowar

📄 Minimizing Identifier Scope in Go Fillmore Labs

🛠 Code & Tools

go-size-analyzer: Analyze the Size of Dependencies in Compiled Go Binaries — Supporting ELF, Mach-O, PE, and even WebAssembly binary formats, this tool lets you get a detailed size breakdown by packages and sections contained within your Go-compiled binaries so you can see what all those bytes are being used for. There’s also an online version to try which worked extremely quickly in my testing.

Zxilly

Gitmal: A Static Page Generator for Repos — You know how GitHub lets you navigate your repo and read docs and code in a well-formatted, structured way? Gitmal generates the same output but in static form for hosting wherever you like. A neat idea! Here’s a live demo.

Anton Medvedev

Katana 1.3: A Web Crawling and Spidering Framework — A flexible Go-powered Web crawling tool (which can also be used as a library from Go) that can work in both headless and non-headless modes and has lots of customizable features.

ProjectDiscovery

GoReleaser 2.13 – Build/release binaries for multiple platforms. Now with support for publishing MCPs to the GitHub MCP registry.
Unioffice 2.7 – A commercial, pure Go library for working with Word, Excel and PowerPoint files.
Open Policy Agent (OPA) 1.11 – CNCF graduated, general-purpose policy engine.
Lego 4.29 – Let's Encrypt/ACME client and library.
Kubo 0.39 – An IPFS implementation in Go.

📰 Classifieds

Wasting hours debugging AI code alone? Tuple brings your team together to figure it out and ship.

Drop-in e-signatures for your app — BoldSign SDK with sample code, webhooks, and a free sandbox. Get your free API key.

📢 Elsewhere in the ecosystem

Some other interesting stories in the broader landscape:

🔒 Let's Encrypt has announced that it's gradually reducing the validity period of certificates it issues from 90 days to 45 days over the next two years. If you have a process for obtaining certificates from them, you'll want to ensure it's robust enough to handle the change.
🎄 Puzzlers rejoice! Advent of Code is back for another year. This time we get 12 days of puzzles instead of the usual 25, making it easier to complete.. we hope!
Ever fancied analyzing the millions of posts and comments on Hacker News? ClickHouse has released a 55GB dataset, complete with vector embeddings.
If you're an AWS user, you might want to get up to speed with the announcements from AWS re:Invent 2025 this week: AWS Lambda Managed Instances and AWS Lambda durable functions are of particular note.
Matt Godbolt's Advent of Compiler Optimisations 2025 is making for good reading so far. It's not about Go but most compilers will take advantage of the sort of optimizations covered.