Introduction This is a short post to explain why it is not necessary to set $GOROOT when compiling or using Go. TL;DR In general1 it is not necessary to set the $GOROOT environment variable when compiling or using Go 1.0 or later. In fact, setting $GOROOT can lead to hard to debug problems if you have multiple versions of Go present on your computer. You still need to set $GOPATH. Since Go 1.0 set