Golang Weekly Issue 589: February 13, 2026

#589 — February 13, 2026

Together with

Go 1.26 Released

Finally, the day we've all been waiting for! Go 1.26 has been released. It packs in a variety of syntax, runtime, and performance changes and improvements, with these being the ones that stood out to us:

The Green Tea garbage collector is now enabled by default. You can revert to the old one with GOEXPERIMENT=nogreenteagc for now, however.
new can now accept an expression, specifying the initial value.
Be aware that go mod init now defaults to a lower Go version in new go.mod files in an attempt to encourage the creation of modules compatible with currently supported versions of Go.
The runtime overhead of cgo calls has been reduced by ~30%. Ebitengine users, in particular, are excited by this.
An experimental simd/archsimd package providing access to SIMD operations – more on this in some links below.
🤫 Secret mode as a way to securely erase temporary data used by code that manipulates sensitive information.
go fix has been rewritten as a "push-button way to update Go code bases to the latest idioms and core library APIs."
errors.AsType is a handy generic version of errors.As.
io.ReadAll is much faster and more efficient.
The full release notes are here to get the complete picture.

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IN BRIEF:

📈 go-scan.dev is a new site that measures package popularity by scanning go.mod files of popular Go repos. grank.dev offers a similar feature, but also has a trending modules ranking.
📊 The SQLite Drivers Benchmarks Game has been updated for February 2026, comparing the performance of mattn/go-sqlite3, modernc/sqlite, and ncruces/go-sqlite3 on Go 1.26.
Jesús Espino has been working on a series of articles digging into Go runtime internals, like how Go bootstraps its runtime, how Go's linker works, and Go's parser.
JetBrains is hosting a livestreamed Go 1.26 'release party' on February 19, featuring a feature deep dive by Anton Zhiyanov and Alex Rios showing off GoLand's support for 1.26.

Redefining Go Functions — Explores how to rewrite functions at runtime by modifying executable memory. Can you monkey-patch using unsafe, reflect, and mprotect? Yes. Should you? "Expect bugs," says Paul!

Paul Boyd

OTHER GO 1.26 GOODIES:

⭐ The Go 1.26 interactive tour by Anton Zhiyanov remains a must-see if you haven't got to it already.

📄 Detecting Goroutine Leaks with synctest/pprof – There's more on this in the official release notes. Anton Zhiyanov

⚙️ go-simdcsv is a high performance CSV parser that uses Go 1.26's experimental simd/archsimd package.

⚙️ go-highway is a portable SIMD abstraction library supporting multiple architectures, with a fallback to pure Go.

📄 Context-Aware Dialer Methods Anton Zhiyanov

🛠 Code & Tools

Stateless 1.8: A Library to Create Finite State Machines — Create state machines and lightweight state machine-based workflows directly in Go. It supports almost the same API as a similar project in C#. Is it bad I wanted to include this if only for its promo image (above)? Poor gopher!

Quim Muntal

Golangci-lint 2.9: A Fast Way to Run Multiple Linters — Runs linters in parallel, uses caching, supports YAML configuration, integrates with major IDEs, and includes over a hundred linters. v2.9 adds Go 1.26 support. (Changelog.)

Various Contributors

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Honeybadger sponsor

Risor 2.0: An Embeddable Scripting Language for Go Apps — The idea is you get a pragmatic language that feels a bit like a Go/Python hybrid you can embed into your Go app without dragging along a big runtime like V8 or Python itself: “It’s for Go developers who need to evaluate user-provided expressions, rules, or small scripts safely at runtime.” GitHub repo.

Curtis Myzie et al.

💡 Prefer to embed Scheme in your Go app? Wile is a new option to try.

Dozzle 10.0: Simple Container Monitoring and Logging System — A self-hosted Go app that keeps real-time track of what all your containers are up to. A slick project of seven years’ vintage. v10 adds an alerts system and webhooks.

Amir Raminfar

Bubbles 1.0 – A variety of components for Bubble Tea apps. Described as an "an honorary release", likely because they're already working on v2.0!
🤖 Anthropic Go API Library v1.22.0 – Supports Claude Opus 4.6's new 'fast mode' if you need to drain your credits as fast as possible.
🤖 Ollama v0.16.0 – Tool for running and managing large language models on llama.cpp. Now supporting GLM 5 and MiniMax M2.5.
Box CLI Maker 3.0 – Render highly customizable boxes in the terminal, if you don't need a full-on framework like Bubble Tea.
🤖 Crush v0.42.0 – Charm's terminal-based agentic development tool adds GLM 5 support.
💬 Telego 1.6 – Telegram bot library supporting the latest Bot API v9.4.
Go Micro 5.16 – Popular distributed systems/microservices framework.
gosec v2.23.0 – Inspect Go source code for security issues.
jub0bs/cors 0.12 – A principled CORS middleware library.
k6 1.6 – Grafana's modern load testing tool.

👍 Well I thought it was neat..

DiffNav: git diff Pager with a File Tree — Get the GitHub-like diffing experience in your terminal. If you have a Nerd Font installed, you even get nifty icons in the file view.

Dolev Hadar