Package management is one of the things Go has always missed. One of the major drawbacks of the previous (pre 1.11) go get was lack of support for managing dependency versions and enabling reproducible builds. The community has developed package managers and tools like Glide, dep, and many others serving as de-facto solutions for versioning dependencies.
“I use
go getfor production builds.” — said no one ever.
Best Practices for Choosing a Go Module
With a near-endless list of Go Modules, it can be overwhelming trying to decide which is best for your Go build. For new Go developers, it can be difficult to pick a winner for your specific use case.
This phenomenon is nothing new. It's one of the reasons why open-source is so important for developers. Oftentimes, when a module is published by a developer, it was likely developed to solve a specific problem that they are facing. If another developer were to use their module to solve the same problem, there may be some performance criteria needed within that module that the current version does not meet. Luckily, there are often many versions to choose from that can solve different use cases.