Go in Production: What They Don't Tell You in the Getting Started Guide

Go’s reputation for simplicity is well-earned. The language surface area is small, the tooling is excellent, and the compile times are fast. But simple doesn’t mean footgun-free, and there are a handful of Go patterns that work fine in development and break predictably in production.

Goroutine Leaks Are Silent and Deadly

Goroutine leaks — goroutines that never terminate — are the most common production issue we see in Go codebases. They don’t crash your service. They slowly consume memory until something does. The fix is rigorous use of context cancellation and timeout propagation, and the habit of auditing goroutine lifetime for every goroutine you create.

The interface{} Trap

Go’s type system is excellent until you start using empty interfaces to avoid thinking about types. interface{} means “I gave up on type safety here,” and it tends to propagate. The 2023 generics release eliminates most of the legitimate use cases for interface{}. If you’re writing new Go code, you should almost never need it.

Error Wrapping and the errors.Is Pattern

Go’s error handling gets a lot of criticism that’s often deserved. But the errors.Is/errors.As pattern from Go 1.13 solves the most painful parts of it. If your codebase is still using string matching on error messages, that’s a refactor worth prioritizing.