go-tools VS gosec

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.

6. Gosec

You can (and definitely should!) also use gosec.

The crypto source in Go is great, no complaints there. Lints like gosec even recommend using it when generating crypto entropy. Go did a good job here, and I expect Rust will do the same sometime after getrandom reaches 1.0 so the API questions are settled, plus whatever makes sense for the future-proofing the standard library needs.

i think there's https://github.com/securego/gosec linter

Various static analysis tools are available for the Go language, and existing static analysis tools can check general best practices. For example, gosec is a tool to check secure Go coding, and I use it myself. However, coding rules in software development are not only based on best practices, but can also be software- or team-specific. For example

What's the difference between this a https://github.com/securego/gosec?

A github actions workflow is provided to run go fmt, vet, test and gosec. An initial configuration for dependabot is also provided.

Besides what was mentioned, we use : staticcheck.io and https://github.com/securego/gosec

For application code, there are different SAST (Static Application Security Testing) tools like sonarqube, which provide vulnerability scanners for different languages, gosec for analyzing go code and detecting issues based on rules, linters, etc.