eris VS golangci-lint

What really sucks IMO is that there's no compiler support for exhaustive error checks, the amount of boilerplate for handling errors, no sum types like Rust, horrible stacktraces unless you use something like eris, the ease with which you can ignore errors, all make for really poor error handling as it remains. It is now the #1 challenge that devs report for Go as per their own survey. We might see some improvements on this front at some point and seeing the new errors.Join stuff is giving me hope

Attaching stacktraces to errors is one way to make errors more readable. Go has notoriously unreadable errors and when you log the error, the logging function is now at the top of the stack rather than where the error actually originated. There needs to be a simple function that adds some default wrapping when you return an error because as it is, you need packages like Eris to make the errors even halfway readable

Actually just stumbled over eris which seems decent.

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.