go-tools VS golangci-lint

Another useful tool in Go is the go vet command, which helps to identify common coding mistakes such as unreachable code or useless comparisons. In addition, external linters like staticcheck can be used to detect bugs and performance issues with ease.

For the last year or so (as of 2023) Golang has only had one active project for linting unused code, namely: unused from https://github.com/dominikh/go-tools. It works really well, but only within a package, not across packages, like within a traditional monolith. unused used to be part of another project called staticcheck, that did indeed have a flag for detecting project-wide unused code, but that is no longer supported. There are good reasons for that (see this Github discussion), mainly that it's computationally expensive.

To a degree, sure. It can't pick it up in general, because of the halting problem. But some trivial cases could be caught. Feel free to write such a linter, I'm sure Dominik would gladly merge it, for example.

IDE: use whatever make you productive. I personally use vscode. VCS: git, as golang communities use github heavily as base for many libraries. AFAIK Linter: use staticcheck for linting as it looks like mostly used linting tool in go, supported by many also. In Vscode it will be recommended once you install go plugin. Libraries/Framework: actually the standard libraries already included many things you need, decent enough for your day-to-day development cycles(e.g. `net/http`). But here are things for extra: - Struct fields validator: validator - Http server lib: chi router , httprouter , fasthttp (for non standard http implementations, but fast) - Web Framework: echo , gin , fiber , beego , etc - Http client lib: most already covered by stdlib(net/http), so you rarely need extra lib for this, but if you really need some are: resty - CLI: cobra - Config: godotenv , viper - DB Drivers: sqlx , postgre , sqlite , mysql - nosql: redis , mongodb , elasticsearch - ORM: gorm , entgo , sqlc(codegen) - JS Transpiler: gopherjs - GUI: fyne - grpc: grpc - logging: zerolog - test: testify , gomock , dockertest - and many others you can find here

Also proposal to staticcheck, will see if it goes through! https://github.com/dominikh/go-tools/issues/1337

This is the first result for that error in google. The comment in that issue explains it. You're building two array's c_code, and c_start_date which are built and then never read or returned or otherwise used.

This really irritated me when I started working with go, but it stopped bothering me and now I even mostly like it.

The missing error checks are annoying, but if you have appropriate editor config it is hard to miss them: https://cdn.billmill.org/static/newsyctmp/warning.png

Basically writing go without `staticcheck`[1] is not recommended. If you do have it set up, it's pretty easy to avoid simple errors like that.

[1]: https://staticcheck.io/

However, recently [per this issue](https://github.com/dominikh/go-tools/issues/1270) it is safe to re-enable the ones I highlighted with strikethrough above. I would be interested in tracking issues for the remainder if you have those linked somewhere.

Unfortunately I don't know of any tools that can/do always detect it. There's this discussion for the staticcheck linter where they basically don't think it's worth false positives in order to support it a lint for it.

One of the checkers in golangci-lint does this. I forget which one.

golangci-lint rolls up lot of linters and checkers into a single binary.

There is a config file too.

https://github.com/golangci/golangci-lint

golangci-lint is an amazing open-source tool for CI in Go projects. Basically, it's an aggregator and a Go linters runner that makes life easier for developers. It includes all the well-known liners by default but also provides an easy way to integrate new ones.

Fun fact: We actually use a code linter via golangci-linter to catch misspellings in code/comments using client9/misspell.

The "standard linter" in Go is https://golangci-lint.run/ , which includes [1] the absolutely-vital errcheck which will do that for you.

For an Advent of Code challenge you may want to turn off a lot of other things, since the linter is broadly tuned for production, public code by default and you're creating burner code and don't care whether or not you have godoc comments for your functions, for instance. But I suggest using golangci-lint rather than errcheck directly because there's some other things you may find useful, like ineffassign, exportloopref, etc.

[1]: https://golangci-lint.run/usage/linters/

golangci-lint recently integrated go-check-sumtype. I recommend using golangci-lint as a pre-commit hook, but if you're in a real hurry you can replace "go build" with a shell script that runs go-check-sumtype instead. This is probably better than a weird hack, not that you're saying that the weird hack is a good idea anyhow.

Golangci-lint is a tool for checking Go code quality, finding issues, bugs, and style problems. It helps keep the code clean and maintainable.

This is such an infuriating problem. I'm convinced I'm using Go wrong, because I simply can't understand how this doesn't make it a toy language. Why the $expletive am I wasting 20-30 and more minutes per week of my life looking for the source of an error!?

Have you seen https://github.com/tomarrell/wrapcheck? It's a linter than does a fairly good job of warning when an error originates from an external package but hasn't been wrapped in your codebase to make it unique or stacktraced. It comes with https://github.com/golangci/golangci-lint and can even be made part of your in-editor LSP diagnostics.

But still, it's not perfect. And so I remain convinced that I'm misunderstanding something fundamental about the language because not being able to consistently find the source of an error is such an egregious failing for a programming language.