Hacker News

by Ryan Harman

Go Analysis Framework: modular static analysis by go team (pkg.go.dev)

152 points by AbuAssar 8 hours ago

b7e7d855b448 3 hours ago

You guys can keep complaining about how go is too verbose, but I love everything about go.

I love the error handling, I love the forced formatting, i love all the linting it has including style guides. When you read other source code it's so easy to understand it and make sense of it. Thank you go team

(Ok, maybe I am a bit sceptical with the latest generic additions, but overall it's a great language. I love it.)

wannabe44 3 hours ago

Oh yeah totally agree. I don't understand why someone would want to write `slices.Contains(s, needle)` when you can write this beautiful poem like a Shakespeare in VSCode:

    found := false
    for _, v := range s {
        if v == needle {
            found = true
            break
        }
    }
Oh and I totally want to build a stack trace manually. It's like doing cardio to me.

    if err != nil {
       return fmt.Errorf("my function name but in spaces: %w", err);
    }
This is very elegant by the way, so that we need errors.Is now, which has to dynamically check if the error implements Unwrap() error or Unwrap() []error. Because having any language facilities for error handling is harmful.

b7e7d855b448 2 hours ago

I don't say it's perfect, but right in this moment I feel most comfortable with go and I don't mind jumping through a few hoops or writing things multiple times

msie 2 hours ago

You forgot to put /s after your post.

logicchains 3 hours ago

Your handwritten one has a major performance bug:

    found := false
    for _, v := range s {
        if v == needle {
            found = true
            break
        }
    }
Do you see it? It copies the v into a local variable, which could be tremendously wasteful if it's a large struct. You should instead be taking a pointer to s[i] and comparing the value there with `needle`.

If you'd used `slices.Contains(s, needle)`, on the other hand, it could have such a performance bug in it and you'd never know.

kajman an hour ago

boredatoms an hour ago

mathisfun123 an hour ago

eptcyka an hour ago

I love how during prototyping, the compiler will tell me off for having an unused variable and fail to compile. I totally love the idea of crashing when writing on a closed channel.

Someone 2 hours ago

> I love the error handling

Even if you prefer manually checking for errors after every call that might fail, I fail to see how one can love go’s verbosity. Compare go’s

   foo, err := bar()
   if err != nil {
     return ERR;
   }
with something like (hypothetical)

  foo := bar() ||| return ERR;
where the compiler, seeing that bar returns an Either<int,err> can enforce the presence of the ||| clause or, alternatively, require later code to check for errors if the ||| clause isn’t present. I think that’s both more robust (prevents one from forgetting to check for errors) and shorter (allowing for showing a lot more code on a screen or page)

jerf 3 hours ago

If generics were going to ruin the language, they would have by now. I think you can rest easy.

ncruces 3 hours ago

The greatest thing about generics is … that they're not used much if at all.

Which is a great way to make sure they're not overused, which in my experience is better than underuse.

gempir 2 hours ago

It doesn't have a lot of style guides or linting though. You have to install and configure quite a lot of tooling for that

jamescun 7 hours ago

This isn't new?

You can see it's used by _a lot_ of linters already:

https://pkg.go.dev/golang.org/x/tools/go/analysis?tab=import...

tgv 6 hours ago

I visited that link three years ago. It isn't new. It's nifty, though.

stephbook 5 hours ago

It was mentioned in the Ruff article comments and probably reposted.

jzelinskie 3 hours ago

For SpiceDB[0], we've found a lot of success using this framework to define our own analyzers; it's probably 10x easier now with LLMs. No need for tribal knowledge or more time wasted on code review if you can just turn it into a linter and move on.

[0]: https://github.com/authzed/spicedb/tree/main/tools/analyzers

mchav an hour ago

Can these sorts of primitives be used to create broader "architectural" linters?

ksec 3 hours ago

So what is context? This isn't new and why the submission ?

hxtk 2 hours ago

Someone in the thread about the Ruff update ingenuously said they wished Go had something like Ruff, being unaware of this framework. In that thread, someone seemed to take it as a sign that many people who might care to know about this don't yet, so they made a dedicated post for it.

hoppp 7 hours ago

I was just looking for this. Will give it a spin.

verdverm 2 hours ago

The Go team's emphasis on tooling in the service of software engineering is a boon to human and agentic development alike. Give yourself and your agents great tools.

An example from one of my recent projects: https://github.com/verdverm/gmd/blob/main/Makefile (give agents simple "tool calls" instead of needing to divine the correct args/flags every time, essentially invocable agents.md content)

One of the interesting things to call out from this is using build tags for testing { unit, coverage, recorded, real api }, with the buffet allowing the agent to iterate faster and more targeted. I tend to run the linting and coverage in a new session, have a report generated, and then another fresh session to start dealing with gaps.

Another super cool testing tool in the Go internal source is `testscript`. Roger Peppe extracted a number of those internal utilities here https://github.com/rogpeppe/go-internal/tree/master/testscri...