Write Go like a senior engineer.

What I wish I knew when I started… | by Jacob Bennett | Level Up Coding 7/16/23, 8:42 AM

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Write Go like a senior engineer

What I wish I knew when I started writing Go

Jacob Bennett · Follow

Published in Level Up Coding · 7 min read · Dec 11, 2022

1K 8

Renee French, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

I started writing Go professionally in 2018. Here’s what I wish I could tell

myself when I started.

Go is pass-by-value
Go is exclusively pass-by-value. That means each function receives a copy of
the value of what you passed in. No exceptions.

Sort of.

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Write Go like a senior engineer. What I wish I knew when I started… | by Jacob Bennett | Level Up Coding 7/16/23, 8:42 AM

You can pass pointers, too (you’re technically passing the value of the pointer
— the address). And with Go’s strong typing you’ll get type checking on the
underlying pointer.

In this example, we pass the rect struct by value. The struct goes into the
function and all operations modify the value that was passed in, but the
original object remains unchanged since it wasn’t passed by reference.

// https://go.dev/play/p/TAiWwsOZ_n6
package main

import "fmt"

type Rectangle struct {

Width int
Height int
}

func DoubleHeight(rect Rectangle) {

rect.Height = rect.Height * 2
}

func main() {
rect := Rectangle{
Width: 10,
Height: 3,
}

// this won't actually modify rect

DoubleHeight(rect)

fmt.Println("Width", rect.Width)
fmt.Println("Height", rect.Height)
}

This function doesn’t do what we want it to do. The object didn’t get updated.

But we can use a pointer to rect as the argument to the DoubleHeight

function and effectively pass rect by reference.

// https://go.dev/play/p/7L5QQtvzdDU
package main

import "fmt"

type Rectangle struct {

Width int
Height int
}

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Write Go like a senior engineer. What I wish I knew when I started… | by Jacob Bennett | Level Up Coding 7/16/23, 8:42 AM

func DoubleHeight(rect *Rectangle) {

rect.Height = rect.Height * 2
}

func main() {
rect := Rectangle{
Width: 10,
Height: 3,
}

// this modifies rect

DoubleHeight(&rect)

fmt.Println("Width", rect.Width)
fmt.Println("Height", rect.Height)
}

Use (but don’t abuse) pointers

There are 2 pointer-related operators: * and &.

The * operator
The * operator is called the “pointer” operator. The type *Rectangle is a
pointer to a Rectangle instance. Declaring an argument of type *Rectangle

means the function accepts “a pointer to a Rectangle instance”.

var rect *Rectangle

The zero-value of a pointer is nil . Super useful in lots of cases! But it’ll often
lead to panic getting called when you try to call functions on a nil pointer.
Awful to debug (more on that later).

The & operator

The & operator (called the “address of” operator) generates a pointer to its
operand.

rect := Rectangle{
Width: 10,
Height: 3,
}
pntr := &rect

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Write Go like a senior engineer. What I wish I knew when I started… | by Jacob Bennett | Level Up Coding 7/16/23, 8:42 AM

To get the pointer’s underlying value, use the * operator. This is called
“dereferencing the pointer.”

// read rect through the pointer

fmt.Println(*pntr)

// set rect through the pointer

*pntr = Rectangle{
Width: 20,
Height: 4,
}

If you’re ever wondering “should I use a pointer here?” the answer is

probably “Yes.” When in doubt, use a pointer.

nil pointer dereference errors

The bane of my existence.

Sometimes when you use pointers, you'll get this panic that completely shuts
down your program:

panic: runtime error: invalid memory address or nil pointer dereference

This was caused by you trying to dereference a pointer that was nil .

// https://go.dev/play/p/XjtkrEudRe9
package main

import "fmt"

type Rectangle struct {

Width int
Height int
}

func (r *Rectangle) Area() int {

return r.Width * r.Height
}

func main() {
var rect *Rectangle // default value is nil
fmt.Println(rect.Area()) // this will panic
}

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Write Go like a senior engineer. What I wish I knew when I started… | by Jacob Bennett | Level Up Coding 7/16/23, 8:42 AM

The fix is easy. You can check for pointer values before you call methods on
them.

// https://go.dev/play/p/VM0fdzZjiq_Y
package main

import "fmt"

type Rectangle struct {

Width int
Height int
}

func (r *Rectangle) Area() int {

return r.Width * r.Height
}

func main() {
var rect *Rectangle

if rect != nil {
fmt.Println(rect.Area())
} else {
fmt.Println("rect is nil!")
}
}

These errors are often difficult to troubleshoot, and they’ve cost me hours of
bug hunting. If you decide to use pointers, always always check for nil values!

Declare interfaces where you use them

Yeah, ok. Pointers are pretty fundamental in Go. And they aren’t unique to
Go. But interfaces really screw over JS or Python engineers when they
switch.

Interfaces in Go are like a contract that specifies a set of methods that a type
must implement in order to fulfill the contract. For example, if you have an
interface called Reader that defines a Read() method, any type that
implements a Read() method is said to implement the Reader interface, and
can be used wherever a Reader is expected.

One of the cool things about interfaces in Go is that a type can implement
multiple interfaces. For example, if you have a type called File that

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Write Go like a senior engineer. What I wish I knew when I started… | by Jacob Bennett | Level Up Coding 7/16/23, 8:42 AM

implements the Reader and Writer interfaces, you can use a File wherever
you need a Reader or a Writer , or even wherever you need something that
implements both interfaces. This makes it easy to write code that is flexible
and reusable.

Another cool thing about interfaces in Go is that you can use them to define
generic algorithms or functions that work with multiple types. For example,
you could write a sorting function that takes a sort.Interface as input, and
can sort any type that implements the required methods.

package sort

type Interface interface{

Len() int
Less (i , j) bool
Swap(i , j int)
}

This makes it easy to write code that is highly flexible and customizable. You
can create a custom type (e.g. a UserList or PostFeed ) and define those
methods and use them with the standard library.

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Write Go like a senior engineer. What I wish I knew when I started… | by Jacob Bennett | Level Up Coding 7/16/23, 8:42 AM

The secret weapon

I’m not sure why Go doesn’t do this out-of-the-box. But there’s a lot it doesn’t
do out-of-the-box (e.g. error handling). I can only assume this is intentional
design.

Here’s the problem:

How can you guarantee that a struct complies with all of an interface’s
Top highlight
methods?

type SomeInterface interface {

Method()
}

type Implementation struct{}

func (*Implementation) Method() { fmt.Println("Hello, World!") }

var _ SomeInterface = (*Implementation)(nil) // ← this is the line

This last line ensures that Implementation satisfies all methods of

SomeInterface , and will fail to compile if SomeInterface adds methods that
Implementation fails to satisfy.

I’ve created a more full demo of this concept that you can play around with
at go.dev →

Prefer table tests, but don’t overdo it

When you test a function you are really just changing what the inputs and
expected outputs are. Go lets you do this in a really straightforward way
using table tests (or table-driven tests).

Let’s start with the code we want to test. It’s a bit of a mess, but it runs a
critical function in our system so we don’t want to touch it without knowing
that it does exactly what we expect.

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Write Go like a senior engineer. What I wish I knew when I started… | by Jacob Bennett | Level Up Coding 7/16/23, 8:42 AM

package main

import "strings"

func ToSnakeCase(str string) string {

// step 0: handle empty string
if str == "" {
return ""
}

// step 1: CamelCase to snake_case

for i := 0; i < len(str); i++ {
if str[i] >= 'A' && str[i] <= 'Z' {
if i == 0 {
str = strings.ToLower(string(str[i])) + str[i+1:]
} else {
str = str[:i] + "_" + strings.ToLower(string(str[i])) + str[i+1:]
}
}
}

// step 2: remove spaces

str = strings.ReplaceAll(str, " ", "")

// step 3: remove double-underscores

str = strings.ReplaceAll(str, "__", "_")

return str
}

We probably want to test a wide range of inputs to make sure we are getting
the right outputs. Instead of writing individual tests for this, use table testing
to achieve the same result with a cleaner, easier-to-maintain result.

package main

import "testing"

func TestToSnakeCase(t *testing.T) {

type testCase struct {
description string
input string
expected string
}

testCases := []testCase{
{
description: "empty string",
input: "",
expected: "",
},
{
description: "single word",
input: "Hello",
expected: "hello",

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Write Go like a senior engineer. What I wish I knew when I started… | by Jacob Bennett | Level Up Coding 7/16/23, 8:42 AM

},
{
description: "two words (camel case)",
input: "HelloWorld",
expected: "hello_world",
},
{
description: "two words with space",
input: "Hello World",
expected: "hello_world",
},
{
description: "two words with space and underscore",
input: "Hello_World",
expected: "hello_world",
},
}

for _, tc := range testCases {

t.Run(tc.description, func(t *testing.T) {
actual := ToSnakeCase(tc.input)
if actual != tc.expected {
t.Errorf("expected %s, got %s", tc.expected, actual)
}
})
}
}

These test cases are really nice to read!

When to avoid table tests

A good litmus test is: If you’re making logic branches in your actual test call,
you either shouldn’t be using table tests or your function is too complicated
and should be broken up.

This example isn’t too bad to follow (even though it isn’t great code) but it’s
still a code smell that may indicate a poorly-designed function.

// this is BAD
for _, tc := range testCases {
t.Run(tc.description, func(t *testing.T) {
result, err := SomeOverlyComplexFunction(tc.input)

if err == nil {
if tc.expectedResult != result {
t.Errorf("expected %v, got %v", tc.expectedResult, result)
}
} else {
if !strings.Contains(err.Error(), tc.expectedErr.Error()) {
t.Errorf("expected error to be %s, got %s", tc.expectedErr.Error(), err.Error())
}
}
})

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Write Go like a senior engineer. What I wish I knew when I started… | by Jacob Bennett | Level Up Coding 7/16/23, 8:42 AM

Other resources
Effective Go is the starting point for new Go engineers. It remains a constant
bookmark for me even after years of using the language.

Effective Go - The Go Programming Language

Go is a new language. Although it borrows ideas from existing
languages, it has unusual properties that make effective…
go.dev

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Written by Jacob Bennett Follow

8.1K Followers · Writer for Level Up Coding

Engineering, design, curiosity • Dev @ Medium • https://jacob.bio

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