Changes Announced on October 16, 2026

Changes in Go

Updating Go Version Support Policy

Go Protobuf is updating its Go version support policy to support the two most recent major releases of Go, aligning with the official Go Release Policy and Google Cloud Go’s supported versions policy.

Previously, Go Protobuf supported the two most recent Go releases plus one additional prior release to align with Google Cloud Go’s policy at the time. Now that Google Cloud Go has updated its policy to support the two most recent Go releases, Go Protobuf is aligning its support window accordingly.

Starting in the next release, the go language version in Go Protobuf’s go.mod file will be set to the oldest supported Go version (currently Go 1.26, dropping support for Go 1.25 and lower).

This was also announced in the GitHub issue.

Adopting Quarterly Release Cadence and Version Support

Go Protobuf is adopting Protobuf’s quarterly release cadence starting with the 1.37.x release, aligning its minor version numbering and release schedule with protoc.

We have also added a Go section to the Protobuf Version Support page, which documents Go Protobuf’s current support policy and release history. Note that unlike other Protobuf languages, Go Protobuf does not currently use release branches and only the current release is supported; all releases, including patch releases, are rollups from HEAD rather than true cherry-picks. We intend to update this in the future to align with the rest of Protobuf.