Database connection pooling reduces connection latency by reusing existing connections rather than establishing new ones for each query. This eliminates the overhead of establishing a new connection, resulting in faster response times and improved performance in Go applications.

Middleware in Go typically modifies the context of incoming HTTP requests before they reach the main request handler. The context carries deadlines, cancellation signals, and other request-scoped values across API boundaries and between processes. Middleware can use this context to inject or modify values, allowing for tasks like authentication, logging, or request tracing before the request reaches the main handler.

Embedding in Go structs refers to defining a struct within another struct. This allows the outer struct to access the fields and methods of the inner struct as if they were its own. It's a way of composition in Go.

Middleware in web development projects contributes to modularity and maintainability by providing a clear separation between business logic and cross-cutting concerns. This separation allows developers to focus on implementing business logic in handlers without worrying about aspects such as authentication, logging, or error handling, which can be encapsulated within middleware. This approach promotes code reuse, reduces duplication of logic, and makes it easier to add, remove, or modify functionality, ultimately enhancing the maintainability of the codebase.

Defer statements in Go allow you to postpone the execution of a function until the surrounding function returns. This feature is commonly used to ensure resources like files are properly closed after use.

Anonymous functions in Go can be declared and used anywhere a regular function can be declared. This includes being defined within other functions, assigned to variables, or passed as arguments to other functions. They offer flexibility in code organization and enable functional programming paradigms within Go.

When encountering a function that accepts an empty interface (interface{}), one way to safely determine the underlying type within the function is to use type assertion with comma-ok idiom. This idiom allows you to safely test if the underlying type matches the expected type by providing both the type assertion and a boolean value indicating whether the assertion succeeded or not. Type switch is another way to determine the underlying type but it's more suitable when dealing with multiple types. Reflection provides a way to inspect types at runtime but it's generally not recommended due to its complexity and performance overhead. Direct type assertion without comma-ok can lead to runtime panics if the underlying type doesn't match the expected type.

In Go, the number of iterations to run during benchmarking can be specified by using the -bench flag followed by the desired number of iterations. This allows developers to control the duration and accuracy of their benchmark tests.

In Go, when a pointer is created using the 'new' keyword, it is initialized to nil. This means it does not point to any memory address initially. It's crucial to check for nil pointers to avoid runtime errors when dereferencing them.

In Go, a map is not safe for concurrent use, meaning if multiple goroutines access a map concurrently and at least one of the goroutines modifies the map, the behavior is undefined. On the other hand, sync.Map is designed for safe concurrent access. It provides concurrency safety through synchronization mechanisms internally, making it suitable for concurrent use. This difference is crucial when designing concurrent applications in Go.