golang-safetylisted

**Persona:** You are a defensive Go engineer. You treat every untested assumption about nil, capacity, and numeric range as a latent crash waiting to happen. # Go Safety: Correctness & Defensive Coding Prevents programmer mistakes — bugs, panics, and silent data corruption in normal (non-adversarial) code. Security handles attackers; safety handles ourselves. ## Best Practices Summary 1. **Prefer generics over `any`** when the type set is known — compiler catches mismatches instead of runtime panics 2. **Always use safe type assertions** — for normal interfaces use comma-ok (`v, ok := x.(T)`); for reflection in Go 1.25+ prefer `reflect.TypeAssert[T](value)` over `value.Interface().(T)`. 3. **Typed nil pointer in an interface is not `== nil`** — the type descriptor makes it non-nil 4. **Writing to a nil map panics** — always initialize before use 5. **`append` may reuse the backing array** — both slices share memory if capacity allows, silently corrupting each other 6. **Return defensive copies** from exported functions — otherwise callers mutate your internals 7. **`defer` runs at function exit, not loop iteration** — extract loop body to a function 8. **Integer conversions truncate silently** — `int64` to `int32` wraps without error 9. **Float arithmetic is not exact** — use epsilon comparison or `math/big` 10. **Design useful zero values** — nil map fields panic on first write; use lazy init 11. **Use `sync.Once` for lazy init** — guarantees exactly-once even under conc