Go Coding Practices

Go Coding Practices

Application skill for Go style learning (from the archived awesome-guidelines style capsules). For service layout or framework patterns, follow project conventions and stack capsules in skills/*-foundation.

Core Principle

Go code should be gofmt-clear, error-explicit, and concurrency-obvious, interfaces earned at the consumer, not invented at the producer.

When to Use / NOT

• Writing or reviewing Go packages, CLIs, or services.
• Setting up gofmt, go vet, staticcheck in CI.

NOT when:

• Non-Go code.
• Generated protobuf/grpc stubs, validate generators, not hand-edits.

Workflow

1. Format & names, gofmt, MixedCaps, context-aware locals (go-style-formatting-naming.md).
2. Errors, ordinary failures usually return error; preserve the project policy for panic/recover at invariant or framework boundaries. Consult go-style-errors-flow.md for source-specific options.
3. APIs, concrete returns, small consumer interfaces, named external literals (go-style-interfaces-apis.md).
4. Concurrency, make goroutine lifetime, cancellation, and synchronization explicit. Use context where needed; assess shared mutable state rather than banning every global (go-style-concurrency-context.md).
5. Verify, use the project's test/vet/lint commands on changed packages; additional tools are options, not automatic setup work.

Red Flags

• Ordinary recoverable failures unexpectedly escaping as panics
• Ignored err without comment
• Exported mega-interfaces for "clean architecture"
• go func() with no shutdown
• Snake_case or skipping gofmt
• Positional struct literal for imported types

Verification

• gofmt -l clean; go vet ./...; project staticcheck/golangci-lint
• Tests include error paths; shutdown/cancel tests for workers
• Capsule checklist on review

References

• awesome-guidelines/references/go-style-learning-note.md
• awesome-guidelines/references/go-style-formatting-naming.md
• awesome-guidelines/references/go-style-errors-flow.md
• awesome-guidelines/references/go-style-interfaces-apis.md
• awesome-guidelines/references/go-style-concurrency-context.md