Go 1.26 has been released. The latest version of the Google-built programming language enables the higher performing Green Tea garbage collector (GC) by default. It also introduces a change to generic types that simplifies the implementation of complex data structures.
Introduced February 10, Go 1.26 can be downloaded from go.dev.
The Green Tea GC, included as an experimental feature in last year’s Go 1.25, brings a 10% to 40% reduction in garbage collection overhead in real-world programs that make heavy use of garbage collection, the Go team said. This is because it improves the performance of marking and scanning small objects through better locality and CPU scalability, according to the team. Further improvements are expected in GC overhead on the order of 10% when running on newer AMD64-based CPU platforms. For the cautious, the Green Tea GC can by disabled by setting GOEXPERIMENT=nogreenteagc at build time. This opt-out setting is expected to be removed in Go 1.27.