Not that I have anything against or for this proposal, I think the focus should be on items which causes daily friction.

Example the err check pattern:

   val, err := f()
   if err != nil {
      return err
   }

Now to be fair this was discussed in public sometime back. I don't know what became of it.

mdaniel

Or `-Werror` that makes

    // given
    func Onoz() error { return errors.New("kaboom") }
    // when
    Onoz()
    // does not compile due to unhandled error

Golang has an existing syntax for purposefully eating errors via

    _ = Onoz()

but I've caught innumerable bugs in codebases where the author didn't realize (or care?) that funcs returned error and just swallowed it

For a language where an _unused import_ is a compilation error, surely either making error swallowing also a compile error, or (as opt-in behavior) using -Werror as with gcc to say, "no, seriously: no error swallowing permitted"

It might require some silliness given the "vendor deps" pattern, but then again, if one of your deps is also careless, maybe that's _exactly_ the circumstances under which you'd want to call timeout

morelisp

The equivalent of '-Werror' in go is using linters, which will detect that.

mdaniel

I have seen no such linter[0]; do you have one that you know does that?

But, sure, A++ for having to install more stuff when the go compiler considers a different "linter" problem as fatal to the build

0: yes, of course GoLand catches it but prying vim from gophers hands is hard work

morelisp

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.