210-go

Go Engineering Ruleset - (December 2025)

Audience: engineers writing and reviewing Go code Goal: secure, idiomatic, efficient, and highly maintainable Go - without over-engineering

Core Philosophy: Correctness & Safety Simplicity & Maintainability Evidence-Based Performance

• Formatting: gofmt -s (required); tab indentation (Go standard); no line length limit.
• Linting: Run go vet, staticcheck, golangci-lint, and govulncheck. Code must pass go test -race.

Essential Reading:

• Go Proverbs - Simple, poetic, pithy principles from Rob Pike
• Effective Go - Official idiomatic Go guide (note: written in 2009, still valuable for language idioms)

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Go Proverbs (Core Principles)

These proverbs from Rob Pike guide idiomatic Go:

• "Don't communicate by sharing memory, share memory by communicating" - Use channels for coordination
• "Concurrency is not parallelism" - Concurrency is about structure, parallelism is about execution
• "Channels orchestrate; mutexes serialize" - Use channels for coordination, mutexes for mutual exclusion
• "The bigger the interface, the weaker the abstraction" - Keep interfaces small and focused
• "Make the zero value useful" - Types should work correctly when zero-initialized
• "interface{} says nothing" - Prefer specific types; use generics or type assertions when needed
• "Gofmt's style is no one's favorite, yet gofmt is everyone's favorite" - Always use gofmt
• "A little copying is better than a little dependency" - Prefer copying small code over adding dependencies
• "Clear is better than clever" - Readability over cleverness
• "Reflection is never clear" - Avoid reflection unless necessary
• "Errors are values" - Handle errors explicitly; don't ignore them
• "Don't just check errors, handle them gracefully" - Provide context and recovery paths
• "Don't panic" - Use errors, not panics, for normal error handling