How Go Actually Tests: Data From 1,000 Repositories

Fri, 24 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The tests of the 1,000 most-starred Go repositories spend at least 251 hours asleep. Not blocked on I/O, not waiting for a condition. Sleeping, in time.Sleep calls with constant durations, written into test code on purpose. That is ten and a half days of deliberate waiting per full run of the corpus, and it is a floor: we could only count durations that are compile-time constants.

We measured this because we couldn’t find anyone who had. There is no shortage of opinions about how Go tests should be written. There is very little data about how they are written. So we parsed them.

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How Go Actually Tests: Data From 1,000 Repositories