Go 1.24 introduces new support for "Tools", which allows easy consumption of tools (which are written in Go) as a dependency for a project.
This could be anything from golangci-lint to protoc-gen-go.
In this post, I will cover usage and limitations.
Basic usage
Adding a tool to a project is nearly the same as a standard runtime dependency, with the additional -tool flag:
$ goimports # I don't have goimports yet!
zsh: command not found: goimports
$ go get -tool golang.org/x/tools/cmd/goimports
go: added golang.org/x/mod v0.22.0
go: added golang.org/x/sync v0.10.0
go: added golang.org/x/tools v0.29.0
$ go tool goimports --help
usage: goimports [flags] [path ...]
Once we add a tool, we can access it by go tool <name>.

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Go 1.24 introduces support for tools as project dependencies, making tools like `golangci-lint` and `protoc-gen-go` easier to integrate. By using the `-tool` flag, tools can be added similarly to runtime dependencies. While this streamlines tool management, it can introduce issues such as slow build times, shared dependency states, and verbose usage. Potential solutions include creating individual `go.mod` files for each tool to prevent dependency clashes and implementing caching strategies to improve performance. Overall, the update improves but doesn't completely solve all aspects of tool usage in Go projects.

Exploring the new "go tool" support in Go 1.24