It's much simpler than that. It's just a way of defining cleanup functions without having a language-level concept of destructors. Here's an example: https://go

It's much simpler than that. It's just a way of defining cleanup functions without having a language-level concept of destructors. Here's an example: https://gobyexample.com/defer https://gobyexample.com/defer. This simple example should explain everything: package main import "fmt" func function1() { defer fmt.Println("function1: defer a") fmt.Println("function1: inside") defer fmt.Println("function1: defer b") } func main() { fmt.Println("main: before function1") function1() fmt.Println("main: after function1") } Here is the output: main: before function1 function1: inside function1: defer b function1: defer a main: after function1 All defers run in LIFO order at the point when a function returns before the function returns execution back to the caller.