golang

Go Development Best Practices

Version: 2.0.0 Purpose: Comprehensive Go development patterns covering idioms, error handling, concurrency, testing, and quality Scope: Backend development with Go - API services, CLI tools, system software Prerequisites: Basic Go syntax knowledge

Overview

Go (Golang) is designed for simplicity, explicit error handling, and safe concurrent programming. This skill covers production-ready patterns validated by the Go community, official documentation, and industry standards (Uber Engineering, Google).

Core Philosophy:

• Simplicity: "Clear is better than clever" - favor readable code over abstractions
• Explicit over implicit: No exceptions, no hidden control flow, visible errors
• Composition over inheritance: Interfaces and embedding, not class hierarchies
• Built-in concurrency: Goroutines and channels as first-class primitives
• Tooling-first: Format, vet, test, and benchmark built into the language

Key Design Principles:

1. Small interfaces (1-3 methods ideal)
2. Consumer-side interface placement
3. Error values, not exceptions
4. Happy path at left margin
5. Goroutines must have explicit termination

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1. Idiomatic Go Patterns

1.1 Naming Conventions

Package Names:

// ✅ GOOD: Package names are single lowercase identifiers
// Import path: "net/url" → package name: url
// Import path: "encoding/json" → package name: json
package url      // from "net/url"
package json     // from "encoding/json"
package strings

// ❌ BAD
package urls            // No plural
package encodingjson    // Don't smash words together
package stringutils     // Too verbose

Getters and Setters:

type Account struct {
    balance int
}

// ✅ GOOD: No "Get" prefix
func (a *Account) Balance() int {
    return a.balance
}

func (a *Account) SetBalance(amount int) {
    a.balance = amount
}

// ❌ BAD: Java-style getters
func (a *Account) GetBalance() int {
    return a.balance
}