Errcheck Alternatives

errcheck reviews and mentions

• Linter to check for errors ignored with _
  1 project | /r/golang | 5 Nov 2023

  In our codebase I noticed a few cases where people ignored errors returned from functions by assigning them to _, ie result, _ := foo(). The errcheck linter doesn't seem to catch this, does anyone know of a linter that does?

• Golang panics in libraries
  5 projects | dev.to | 1 Aug 2023

  And we also expect that the caller will check the error and handle it. There is a popular linter that checks it for us: errcheck.

• Is it a bad convention to overwrite err variable?
  2 projects | /r/golang | 28 Jun 2023

  You should be using golangci-lint, because all serious Go programmers should. golangci-lint contains errcheck, which will detect if you overwrite an error without having done something with it in the meantime. I consider this one of the most important linters (this doesn't just detect things that may sorta kinda someday turn into bugs, this quite likely is a bug RIGHT NOW), and it helps you have the confidence you can overwrite errors as you go and don't need to keep allocating new ones.

• Integration Tests failing
  1 project | /r/golang | 3 May 2023

  Run golangci-lint over your code if you haven't already and pay special attention to errcheck's output.

• Luciano Remes | Golang is 𝘼𝙡𝙢𝙤𝙨𝙩 Perfect
  7 projects | /r/golang | 2 Jan 2023

  errcheck has a flag for that ;)

• Proposal: Go 2: Lightweight anonymous function syntax
  2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 20 May 2022

  https://github.com/kisielk/errcheck, which is in most of the combined linter packages by default.

  We'll agree to disagree about unused imports; imports have can side-effects.

• Lies we tell ourselves to keep using Golang
  13 projects | /r/programming | 29 Apr 2022

  I prefer functions returning errors over throwing exceptions. Whether it's Go's errors or ML-style options/results, they're both better than exceptions. I cannot remember the last time I had a bug from not checking an error in Go. There's also errcheck which I use as part of my linting that will catch unchecked errors, such that I cannot even commit the code.

• I Want Off Mr. Golang's Wild Ride
  3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 28 Apr 2022

  > Go compiler raise an error if a variable (error) goes unused

  It doesn't though. It's perfectly valid to not use the return value of a function that only returns an error, for instance.

  There are static error checking tools you can use like https://github.com/kisielk/errcheck to work around this, but most people don't use them.

  I've run into a lack of Go error checking many times. Many times it's just the trivial case, where the compiler doesn't warn about not checking the result of an error-returning function.

  But often it'll be subtler, and the result of Go's API design. One example is its file writing API, which requires you to close the file and check its error to be correct. Many times people will just `defer file.Close()`, but that isn't good enough - you're ignoring the error there.

  Worse still is e.g: writing to a file through a bufio.Writer. To be correct, you need to remember to flush the writer, check that error, then close the file and check that error. There's no type-level support to make sure you do that.

• Trying Out Generics in Go
  7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 16 Dec 2021

  I'd be really happy with that! Building the functionality of errcheck[1] and ineffassign[2] into the compiler — or at the very least, into govet — would go a long way to allay my worries with Go.

  I think the reason they don't do this is that it's a slight (albeit a very tiny one) against Go's philosophy of errors being values, just like any other. While the `error` type is standard and used throughout Go source code, it still just has a simple three-line definition[3] and is not treated as a special case anywhere else; there is nothing stopping you from returning your own error type if you wish. A third-party linter could simply check for the `error` type specifically, but the first-party tools should not, and there's nothing like Rust's `#[must_use]` attribute that could be used instead. I respect Go's philosophy, but I feel like pragmatism must win in this case.

  [1]: https://github.com/kisielk/errcheck

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