The Go Code Review Comments List: 10 Rules Every Reviewer Cites

Book: The Complete Guide to Go Programming Also by me: Hexagonal Architecture in Go — the companion book in the Thinking in Go series My project: Hermes IDE | GitHub — an IDE for developers who ship with Claude Code and other AI coding tools Me: xgabriel.com | GitHub You open a pull request in a Go repo you just joined. Ten minutes later there are six comments on it. None of them are about your logic. They point at a capitalized error string, a receiver named this , a context stored on a struct. Each comment links the same page: the Go Code Review Comments wiki. That page is the closest thing Go has to an official style council. It grew out of the comments Go's own maintainers left on CLs for years, and most Go teams treat it as the default rulebook. The problem is that the wiki tells you what but rarely why , so the rules read like arbitrary taste. They aren't. Each one exists because the alternative bit somebody. Here are ten that reviewers cite the most, with the reason behind each. Everything below is idiomatic on Go 1.23+. 1. Error strings are lowercase and unpunctuated The rule: an error string should not be capitalized and should not end with punctuation. // wrong return fmt . Errorf ( "Failed to open config." ) // right return fmt . Errorf ( "failed to open config" ) The reason is wrapping. Go errors get concatenated. Your string is almost never the whole sentence a user reads; it's a fragment in a chain built with %w : return fmt . Errorf ( "load settings: %w" , err ) // -> "load settings: open config: permission denied" Capitalize your fragment and you get load settings: Open config: permission denied in the middle of a line. End it with a period and you get a period in the middle of a longer message. Lowercase, no trailing punctuation, and every fragment composes cleanly no matter where it lands in the chain. The exception is a string that begins with an exported name or acronym, which keeps its own case ( HTTP , TLS ). 2. Receiver types are consistent ac