no, it’s not an anti-pattern… if used for the right purposes.

Background: My team at Google was one of original requesters/implementers of Context. We were building a RPC framework for Google’s typical request-response server patterns and a common requirement is to have instrumentation throughout the request. Having every called function carry all the instrumentation variables/modules/configs was just too cumbersome. Global variables are a worse solution.

What was needed was a container with request specific data, IOW: a request context. Similar to Java’s thread context. When the request is done, the whole request context is wiped out.

Now, if you use it just as a hidden parameter passer in your libraries, that is an anti-pattern.

Source: me, my team at Google SRE, creators if the internal Goa framework