Devs ♥ Security

Go is a simple and fun language, but, like any other language, it has a few gotchas... Many of those gotchas are not entirely Go's fault. Some of these mistakes are natural traps if you are coming from another language. Others are due to faulty assumptions and missing details.

A lot of these gotchas may seem obvious if you took the time to learn the language reading the official spec, wiki, mailing list discussions, many great posts and presentations by Rob Pike, and the source code. Not everybody starts the same way though and that's OK. If you are new to Go the information here will save you hours debugging your code.

Total Beginner:

• Opening Brace Can't Be Placed on a Separate Line
• Unused Variables
• Unused Imports
• Short Variable Declarations Can Be Used Only Inside Functions
• Redeclaring Variables Using Short Variable Declarations
• Accidental Variable Shadowing
• Can't Use "nil" to Initialize a Variable Without an Explicit Type
• Using "nil" Slices and Maps
• Map Capacity
• Strings Can't Be "nil"
• Array Function Arguments
• Unexpected Values in Slice and Array "range" Clauses
• Slices and Arrays Are One-Dimensional
• Accessing Non-Existing Map Keys
• Strings Are Immutable
• Conversions Between Strings and Byte Slices
• Strings and Index Operator