Struct Tags in Go

Dictionary.com defines 'tag' as:

a label attached to someone or something for the purpose of identification or to give other information

The go docs only have a short paragraph covering struct tags which follows:

A field declaration may be followed by an optional string literal tag, which becomes an attribute for all the fields in the corresponding field declaration. The tags are made visible through a reflection interface and take part in type identity for structs but are otherwise ignored.

Basically struct tags allow you to attach metadata to struct fields in the form of arbitrary string values.

The format of the metadata is: `key:val` or `key:val1,val2` in the case of multiple values. By convention the key corresponds to the name of the package consuming it.

This metadata can be intended for another package or you can make use of it yourself. It can be consumed via reflection using the types reflect.Type, reflect.StructField and reflect.StructTag as can be seen in this example.

A common use case is for serialisation/ deserialisation, the 'json' tag which is used by the encoding/json package is an example of this.

It also allows you to incorporate your initialisation code in the struct definition. An example of this is the github.com/caarlos0/env package which uses struct tags to define config structures with associated environment variables and perform boiler-plate free parsing. The package also allows you to set defaults via struct tags which again reduces initialisation code, however this is not compile-time safe.

If you are interested there is a good talk available here: video pdf