go-patterns

Idiomatic Go emphasizes simplicity, small focused interfaces, explicit error handling, and the "accept interfaces, return structs" principle. Go patterns guide you through interface design, error wrapping with context, and concurrency safety using goroutines, WaitGroup, and context cancellation to build reliable, high-performance services aligned with Go 1.21+ conventions.

Robust error handling in Go uses error wrapping to preserve context, sentinel errors for specific conditions, and custom error types for diagnostics. This approach enables callers to inspect and respond to failures appropriately while maintaining a clear error chain throughout your application.

Safe concurrency in Go uses WaitGroup for synchronization, worker pools for bounded parallelism, and context for cancellation and deadlines. These patterns prevent goroutine leaks, eliminate race conditions, and ensure graceful shutdown of concurrent workloads in services and libraries.

Table-driven tests organize test cases as data structures, reducing boilerplate and improving coverage clarity. This pattern, combined with test helpers and interface-based mocking, enables comprehensive testing of Go functions and utilities with minimal code duplication.

The functional options pattern uses option functions to configure constructors, enabling extensible APIs without breaking changes. This approach lets callers set only the settings they need, keeping constructor signatures clean while supporting future feature additions.

Goroutine leaks occur when background tasks never terminate. Context-based cancellation, WaitGroup coordination, and worker pools with bounded channels prevent leaks by ensuring all spawned goroutines exit cleanly when the parent service shuts down.