Go Toolchain lead to a confusing morning but overall I highly approve of its existence

I often read up on the latest updates to Go. I look for the language changes and updates to libraries that I use. A lot of exciting stuff in the past few years with go.mod, go.work, generics, updates to the garbage collector, optimizing compilation, etc. Always fun and I'm usually up to date with my info.

Today I came across an issue and I was like WTF. I saw Go updated to 1.26.1 recently and I wanted to update. So I install from the .msi file that you download from go.dev. I went to verify the install after it was complete…

.\go version
go version go1.25.6 windows/amd64

What?

I go directly to the folder where go is installed and run .\go version. Same thing. Again. What?

I vaguely remember running a command that was given in one reddit post but I couldn't for the life of me tell you what it was. Basically, I was able to update to the latest Go with just a command line. That must have been it. So I googled “update go command line”

Ah. Go Toolchain.

I knew about the Go Toolchain from all of my reading updates and staying up to date with it. The command that I ran updated it to 1.25.6 but did not allow it to be updated beyond that (+auto). This is all of course well documented on Go's blog.

This is the command to run for future me, to update to the latest Go without having to download the .msi and go through the Windows installer.
go env -w GOTOOLCHAIN=go1.26.1+auto

Just update the version! That's very helpful and I imagine useful in other cases like making sure some code gets compiled with the same version for whatever reason, and there could be many.