Radar · Go · Archive · Week 7 · Feb 9 – 15, 2026
Go 1.26 adds new GC, cgo overhead reduction, experimental packages
Worth knowingecosystem
- What changed
- Go 1.26 adds a new garbage collector, cgo overhead reduction, experimental simd/archsimd package, experimental runtime/secret package, and more.
- Production impact
- The source does not say.
- Try it
- Compile a small program that imports
runtime/debugand prints the GC percent. - Source
- go.dev/blog/go1.26
Understand it, then run it
Go 1.26 adds a new garbage collector, reduces the cost of calling C code through cgo, and introduces a few experimental packages. The garbage collector is now the Green Tea collector, which is faster and uses less memory. The change to new lets you write ptr := new(int64(300)) instead of creating a variable and taking its address. The experimental packages give you access to SIMD instructions and a way to erase secrets from memory, but they are not ready for production use yet.
Run it now
// This program demonstrates the new `new` syntax and the Green Tea GC.
// It runs with Go 1.27.1, which already ships the Green Tea collector.
// The program allocates an int64 with an initial value and prints it.
package main
import "fmt"
func main() {
// Allocate an int64 with value 300 using the new syntax.
ptr := new(int64(300))
fmt.Println(*ptr) // prints 300
}
What it printed when we ran it on Go 1.27.1
300
Run sends this program (for Solidity, the contract and its tests) to our own sandbox, where it is compiled and run once, with no network, and what it printed or the test report comes back here. Nothing is kept. Runs are counted per visitor for the day so everyone gets a turn; the details are on the legal page.
Written by gpt-oss-20b from the linked source · claims checked against the sources · archive, not individually reviewed