Welcome to our Tebeka Shorts series, episode 56!  --  In this video, Miki breaks down the new omitzero JSON flag introduced in Go 1.24. -- Watch now to learn how to replace omitempty with omitzero to cleanly exclude unspecified time values from your output.

For a long time, Go developers have relied on omitempty to keep empty values out of JSON payloads and save bytes. However, omitempty falls short when dealing with structs like time.Time, as Go does not inherently consider these zero-value structs to be "empty". Using a practical LogQuery example, Miki demonstrates exactly how Go evaluates zero values under the hood by looking for the IsZero() bool function.

Things you will learn in this episode: 
- The limitations of omitempty with structs in Go
- How the new omitzero tag works in Go 1.24
- How Go uses the IsZero() method to evaluate zero values for types like time.Time

By utilizing this feature, developers can significantly reduce payload sizes by ensuring that uninitialized time and struct fields are not transmitted. This update provides a more precise and elegant way to manage data serialization in Go applications.

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Go 1.24 introduces the `omitzero` JSON struct tag flag as an alternative to `omitempty`. While `omitempty` skips fields with empty values (which doesn't work for structs like `time.Time`), `omitzero` skips fields whose value is the zero value — determined by calling an `IsZero() bool` method if present. This makes it straightforward to exclude zero-value time fields from JSON output without workarounds.

Tebeka Shorts: The New omitzero JSON Flag in Go 1.24