Testing in Go — Table-Driven Tests, Benchmarks, and go test Habits

Testing in Go — Table-Driven Tests, Benchmarks, and go test Habits

In part 5 I built a working Orders API with Gin — routes, middleware, an in-memory store, and proper error handling. This time I'm writing tests for it, and the story here is one of the things I've genuinely liked about Go from the start: testing is a first-class citizen with zero framework ceremony. No JUnit, no Mockito, no Spring Boot test context to spin up. Just go test and the standard library.

The go test Mental Model

Every _test.go file in a Go package is compiled and run by go test. Test functions follow one convention — they take a single *testing.T argument and start with Test:

func TestSomething(t *testing.T) {