Enhancing Code Quality with Go’s Analysis Package

Build Custom Analyzers and Integrate with Golangci-Linter

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The Go language is popular for its concise syntax and efficiency. And the more widely it is used, the more important to follow coding standards and consistency. To achieve this goal, we can seek for various static code analysis tools, such as the well-known golangci-lint.

While digging into golangci and the Go official guide, I discovered a powerful tool, the golang.org/x/tools/go/analysis package, which can facilitate linters customizing.

What’s in analysis

The golang.org/x/tools/go/analysis package provides a static analysis framework for Go, supporting transitive analysis, where the output of an analyzer can serve as input to other analyzers and enabling developers to customize tools for static code inspection. These tools can be integrated into the Go tool chain, such as run with the go vet command.

Main APIs

• Analyzer, the core structure, is also a static analyzer. Each Analyzer has a name, document description and a Run function as prerequisites.

type Analyzer struct {
 Name             string
 Doc              string
 Flags            flag.FlagSet
 Run              func(*Pass) (interface{}…