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Go Proverbs

The Go Proverbs are a collection of short sayings that capture the philosophy behind the Go programming language. They were popularized by Rob Pike and reflect the language’s emphasis on simplicity, clarity, and pragmatic engineering.

These proverbs often serve as guidelines for writing idiomatic Go, rather than strict rules. Understanding them helps developers write code that aligns with the design intent of the language.

Original source: https://go-proverbs.github.io/

Don't communicate by sharing memory; share memory by communicating​

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Concurrency is not parallelism​

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Channels orchestrate; mutexes serialize​

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The bigger the interface, the weaker the abstraction​

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Make the zero value useful​

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interface says nothing​

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Gofmt's style is no one's favorite, yet gofmt is everyone's favorite​

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A little copying is better than a little dependency​

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Syscall must always be guarded with build tags​

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Cgo must always be guarded with build tags​

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Cgo is not Go​

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With the unsafe package there are no guarantees​

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Clear is better than clever​

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Reflection is never clear​

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Errors are values​

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Don't just check errors, handle them gracefully​

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Design the architecture, name the components, document the details​

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Documentation is for users​

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A little duplication is far cheaper than the wrong abstraction​

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