Zen of Go

Clarity, readability, simplicity, are all aspects of maintainability. Can the thing you worked hard to build be maintained after you’re gone? What can you do today to make it easier for those that come after you?

A well designed Go package provides a single idea, a set of related behaviours. A good Go package starts by choosing a good name. Package names should always be lowercase and not contain any underscores or dashes. Think of your package’s name as an elevator pitch to describe what it provides, using just one word. Common examples, controllers, jobs, services, utils.

Robust programs are composed from pieces that handle the failure cases before they pat themselves on the back. The verbosity of if err ! nil { return err }=is outweighed by the value of deliberately handling each failure condition at the point at which they occur. Panic and recover are not exceptions, they aren’t intended to be used that way. Ensure you always use log.Printf(err.Error()) in order to log those errors to the application log for monitoring or debugging.

Every time you indent you add another precondition to the programmer’s stack consuming one of the 7 ±2 slots in their short term memory. Avoid control flow that requires deep indentation. Rather than nesting deeply, keep the success path to the left using guard clauses.

Let the caller choose if they want to run your library or function asynchronously, don’t force it on them. If your library uses concurrency it should do so transparently.

Goroutines own resources; locks, variables, memory, etc. The sure fire way to free those resources is to stop the owning goroutine.

Seek to be explicit, reduce coupling, and spooky action at a distance by providing the dependencies a type needs as fields on that type rather than using package variables. Exceptions to this rule are a global singleton for the application config, and a database pool connection.

Simplicity is not a synonym for unsophisticated. Simple doesn’t mean crude, it means readable and maintainable. When it is possible to choose, defer to the simpler solution.

Test first or test later, if you shoot for 100% test coverage or are happy with less, regardless, your package’s API is your contract with its users. Tests are the guarantees that those contracts are written in. Make sure you test for the behaviour that users can observe and rely on.

So many crimes against maintainability are committed in the name of performance. Optimisation tears down abstractions, exposes internals, and couples tightly. If you’re choosing to shoulder that cost, ensure it is done for good reason.

Use goroutines, channels, locks, interfaces, embedding, in moderation.

My convention is using camelCase for all purposes, including JSON responses, and in Go, if you would like to have a member (function, variable, struct var) exported (public) you must do it with UpperCamelCase. I avoid snake_case at all costs, since I mostly use it for database fields.

Only use one letter variables when the scope of them is so reduced and when it does not affect the readability and maintainability of the code they are lodged in.

Comments should only be written using /. The multi-line comment /* * is left for disabling large pieces of code. Function comments should not include any type annotations or similar habits. GoDoc is not PHPDoc or JavaDoc. Every package should include a Doc.go file which serves as introduction to the package’s purpose, such as below. Document why, not how.

If you happen to know the exact size that a slice will take, always allocate that. Only use append in the case where you may be filtering out items, and/or are not sure of the size the list will be. This is more clear and more efficient.