ineffassign

Not to take away from your argument, but for what it's worth, there is a lint for this [1] which is available in golangci-lint [2]. If there is any Go developer reading this who does not know about golangci-lint, I wholeheartedly recommend looking into it. It's found a fair share of significant issues for me that otherwise would have required tests to uncover. [1] https://github.com/gordonklaus/ineffassign [2] https://golangci-lint.run/

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 pragmat

Staticcheck is inavluable, and I support it with words, actions, and money. Here are some additional tools that you might want to have in your module's tools.go: * github.com/kisielk/errcheck[1]: Find cases where you (accidentally?) ignore errors. * github.com/gordonklaus/ineffassign[2]: Find ineffectial assignments; sounds simple, almost unneeded, but in my practice it's actually one of the most effective analyses to find actual bugs. * mvdan.cc/unparam[3]: Find functions that always consume or return one value; great for refactorings. [1] https://github.com/kisielk/errcheck [2] https://github.com/gordonklaus/ineffassign [3] https://github.com/mvdan/unparam

Not sure about that. But https://github.com/gordonklaus/ineffassign catches that.