The Go team has officially released Go 1.26, which arrived on time, six months after version 1.25. The biggest language change is that you can now pass an expression directly to the built-in new function.
With that said, now, developers can use new(expr) to allocate and initialize a pointer in one step. Previously, you had to allocate memory first, then assign a value, or use a temporary variable. This update makes pointer initialization easier without changing how things work.
Additionally, the compiler now removes unnecessary operations and improves the generated code in certain cases. These changes are internal and don’t require you to change your code. The runtime has also been improved to reduce overhead in common tasks.
Updates to the toolchain make builds more consistent and improve diagnostics by fixing issues and adding small improvements to core development tools. The standard library also gets targeted updates and bug fixes.
For more details, see the official announcement or the release notes. Go 1.26 still keeps backward compatibility, as promised by the project.
