Hands-On Software Engineering with Golang

Circular dependencies

For a Go program to be well formed, its import graph must be acyclic; in other words, it must not contain any loops. Any violation of this predicate will cause the Go compiler to emit an error. As the systems you are building grow in complexity, so does the probability of eventually hitting the dreaded import cycle detected error.

Usually, import cycles are an indication of a fault in the design of a software solution. Fortunately, in many cases, we can refactor our code and work around most import cycles. Let's take a closer look at some common cases where circular dependencies occur and some strategies for dealing with them.