client VS golangci-lint

You still end up with the same problem, though, just in a container instead of directly on your computer's filesystem. The root issue is that if you are working on two modules where one depends on the other, say github.com/yourname/server and github.com/yourname/client, the compiler (and gopls) is checking your function calls, etc. against the version in the repository, not the version you have on your computer that you just modified. This means that you would have to make a change, commit it to the repo, then do go mod download to get the changes, and then check to see if they work.

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.