The Go language provides an internal testing library, named "testing", which is relatively slim due to the fact that the standard library correctness by itself is verified using it. The gocheck package, on the other hand, expects the standard library from Go to be working correctly, and builds on it to offer a richer testing framework for libraries and applications to use.

It includes features such as:

- Helpful error reporting to aid on figuring problems out (see below)
- Richer test helpers: assertions which interrupt the test immediately,
- deep multi-type comparisons, string matching, etc
- Suite-based grouping of tests
- Fixtures: per suite and/or per test set up and tear down
- Management of temporary directories
- Panic-catching logic, with proper error reporting
- Proper counting of successes, failures, panics, missed tests, skips, etc
- Explicit test skipping
- Support for expected failures
- Verbosity flag which disables output caching
- Fully tested (yes, it manages to test itself reliably! :-)