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name: go description: Best practices for Go development including idiomatic patterns, concurrency, and error handling. globs: ["/*.go", "/go.mod", "**/go.sum"] priority: 90 tags: ["language"]

Go Best Practices

Code Style

• Use gofmt for formatting
• Follow Effective Go guidelines
• Use short variable names in small scopes
• PascalCase for exported, camelCase for unexported

Error Handling

• Always check errors
• Return errors, don't panic
• Wrap errors with context: fmt.Errorf("context: %w", err)
• Use errors.Is/As for error checking
• Define sentinel errors with errors.New

Concurrency

• Don't communicate by sharing memory
• Share memory by communicating (channels)
• Use context for cancellation
• sync.WaitGroup for goroutine coordination
• Use select for multiple channel operations

Patterns

• Accept interfaces, return structs
• Make zero values useful
• Use embedding for composition
• Table-driven tests

Performance

• Use sync.Pool for object reuse
• Profile with pprof
• Use buffered channels when appropriate
• Avoid premature optimization