Announcing Gin 1.12.0: BSON Support, Context Improvements, Performance & More

Gin v1.12.0 Has Arrived

We’re thrilled to announce the release of Gin v1.12.0, packed with new features, meaningful performance improvements, and a solid round of bug fixes. This release deepens Gin’s support for modern protocols, refines the developer experience, and continues the project’s tradition of staying fast and lean.

🌟 Key Features

• BSON Protocol Support: The render layer now supports BSON encoding, opening the door to more efficient binary data exchange (#4145).

• New Context Methods: Two new helpers make error handling cleaner and more idiomatic:

  • GetError and GetErrorSlice for type-safe error retrieval from context (#4502)
  • Delete method for removing keys from context (#38e7651)

• Flexible Binding: URI and query binding now honor encoding.UnmarshalText, giving you more control over custom type deserialization (#4203).

• Escaped Path Option: A new engine option lets you opt into using the escaped (raw) request path for routing (#4420).

• Protocol Buffers in Content Negotiation: context now supports Protocol Buffers as a negotiable content type, making gRPC-style responses easier to integrate (#4423).

• Colorized Latency in Logger: The default logger now renders latency with color, making it easier to spot slow requests at a glance (#4146).

🚀 Performance & Enhancements

• Router Tree Optimizations: Multiple improvements to the radix tree reduce allocations and speed up path parsing:
  • Fewer allocations in findCaseInsensitivePath (#4417)
  • Path parsing using strings.Count for efficiency (#4246)
  • Regex replaced with custom functions in redirectTrailingSlash (#4414)
• Recovery Optimization: Stack trace reading is now more efficient (#4466).
• Logger Improvements: Query string output can now be skipped via configuration (#4547).
• Unix Socket Trust: X-Forwarded-For headers are now always trusted when requests arrive over a Unix socket (#3359).
• Flush Safety: Flush() no longer panics when the underlying http.ResponseWriter does not implement http.Flusher (#4479).
• Code Quality Refactors: Cleaner map handling with maps.Copy and maps.Clone, named constants replacing magic numbers, modernized range-over-int loops, and more (#4352, #4333, #4529, #4392).

🐛 Bug Fixes

• Router Panic Fixed: Resolved a panic in findCaseInsensitivePathRec when RedirectFixedPath is enabled (#4535).
• Content-Length in Data Render: Data.Render now correctly writes the Content-Length header (#4206).
• ClientIP with Multiple Headers: ClientIP now correctly handles requests with multiple X-Forwarded-For header values (#4472).
• Binding Edge Cases: Fixed empty value errors in binding (#2169) and improved empty slice/array handling in form binding (#4380).
• Literal Colon Routes: Routes with literal colons now work correctly with engine.Handler() (#4415).
• File Descriptor Leak: RunFd now closes the os.File handle properly to prevent resource leaks (#4422).
• Hijack Behavior: Refined hijack behavior to correctly model the response lifecycle (#4373).
• Recovery: http.ErrAbortHandler is now suppressed in the recovery middleware as intended (#4336).
• Debug Version Mismatch: Fixed an incorrect version string reported in debug mode (#4403).

🔧 Build, Dependency & CI Updates

• Go 1.25 Minimum: The minimum supported Go version is now 1.25, with CI workflows updated accordingly (#4550).
• BSON Dependency Upgrade: The BSON binding dependency has been upgraded to mongo-driver v2 (#4549).

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Gin 1.12.0 reflects the dedication of our community — contributors, reviewers, and users alike. Thank you for making Gin better with every release.

Ready to try Gin 1.12.0? Upgrade on GitHub and let us know what you think!