This is at least the biggest release since 1.18 with generics, possibly bigger. I’m excited because the changes demonstrate a transition from the traditional go philosophy of almost fanatical minimalism, to a more utilitarian approach.

Loop variable capture is a foot-gun that in the last six years has cost me about 10-20 hours of my life. So happy to see that go. (Next on my list of foot-guns would be the default infinite network timeouts — in other words, your code works perfectly for 1-N months and then suddenly breaks in production. I always set timeouts now; there’s basically no downside)

Interesting to see them changing course on some fundamental decisions made very early on. The slices *Func() functions use cmp() int instead of less() bool, which is a huge win in my book. Less was the Elegant yet bizarre choice — it often needs to be called twice, and isn’t as composable as cmp.

The slog package is much closer to the ecosystem consensus for logging. It’s very close to Uber’s zap, which we’re using now. The original log package was so minimal as to be basically useless. I wonder why they’re adding this now.

I’ve already written most of what’s in the slices and maps packages, but it’ll be nice to have blessed versions of those that have gone through much more API design rigor. I’ll be able to delete several hundred lines across our codebase.

What’s next? An http server that doesn’t force you to write huge amounts of boilerplate? Syntactic sugar for if err != nil? A blessed version of testify/assert? Maybe not, but I’m happy about these new additions.