Design Patterns in Go

Part of the Go course

Programs get big. A file that made complete sense at two hundred lines becomes a place where a small change breaks something three files away, and the tests get slower and harder to write until nobody writes them. That is not a failure of skill, it is what happens when everything in a program can reach everything else.

A design pattern is a shape people keep arriving at independently because it solves that problem well. It is not a rule and not a framework, it is a description of an arrangement that has worked. Go has a handful that appear over and over in real codebases, and they are unusually small: no class hierarchies, no annotations, mostly just functions and interfaces used carefully. ...