I wish Go had something like Ruff! A lot of languages are getting amazing tool but Go has a very fragmented ecosystem with a lot of tools but none of them feel as high quality has the likes of Ruff, Oxc, Biome or even PHP's Mago
It is fairly new so not well known but it is what powers go fix and go vet under the hood. And I believe the Go team is currently working on making it possible for module authors to easily describe their own custom analysis passes that would run automatically when running go fix.
It is extremely easy to define your own analysis.Analyzer struct that describes your own static analysis pass. You get access to all sorts of useful information such as the AST, types, even SSA info and you can even compose the information between analyzers. Then you can easily compile it into a binary and run it by passing that binary to go fix with a command line flag. The go toolchain itself handles all the complex caching logic so that your analyzers run fast.
Since it is made by the go team itself and part of the toolchain it should slowly become the unified standard you are looking for. So hopefully golangci-lint and others should eventually all unify under this framework.
You can easily give it a go by telling some AI agent to write some Go Analysis analyzers and telling them to drive them with go fix. My Go projects tend to accumulate a bunch of these to enforce all sorts of rules deterministically and automatically instead of some imprecise markdown file.
That sounds amazing! I do hope golangci-lint and the likes pick it up, I'm a big fan of the strict by default approach that Ruff and other linters have taken.
Gofmt is great but it's still not very strict, the amount of times my colleagues have argued about formatting in Go is still too great, stuff like consts, types, funcs, methods order, struct initialziation newlines and other details that do matter, but they should be decided one and then applied everywhere like that.
On problem of such go linters is they can only lint what the compiler sees so if you have multiple `build` tags, you need to run multiple lint passes. No other language's linter operates like they, they all operate on file level.
Yeah, that's how much Astral changed python. UV and Ruff are amazing tools.
Go can get there, but like I said, I think everyone is building some partial tools that solve some problems, but there is not that one player building that one great tool.
I’m not entirely sure what you mean by a fragmented ecosystem? Go has first-party formatting and linting and the language is deliberately restricted to ensure it is written in a certain way, even when written by complete novices.
Compare that to Python or TypeScript which are Wild West languages without opinionated first-party tooling, and it’s clear why Ruff/Biome feel great.
Go has a good start for that, but It's not enough for me.
Gofmt is a great idea but it isn't strict enough for my taste. Go does not have any first party static analyzers, closest is Staticcheck which is even sponsored by Google themselves
I don't believe you can add custom analyzers to `go vet`, which arguably rules it out.
But it is extremely simple to make a custom vet-like tool, because it's a trivial binary wrapper around the analysis framework, which is first-party (though it's structurally pretty limited by design, and won't handle all linting needs): https://cs.opensource.google/go/go/+/refs/tags/go1.26.5:src/...
I've been using golangci-lint for years, it's okay but it's slow even with a cache, as soon as you have good amount of lints enabled your ci can suddendly take minutes.
That's not the fault of golangci-lint, it's just the concept of bringing together a bunch of different linters and keeping it fast is impossible. And the configuration is a bit wild too, because every linter obviously has their own decisions on how it wants to be configured.
What? I feel go has one of the best language tooling out there without requiring a bully ide to do stuff. golangci-lint is quite comprehensive. What do you miss otherwise?
(Honestly go's distributing itself has covered a lot of it)
golangci-lint is good, but you have to glue together a bunch of linters, and it adds up. You can easily get runtimes of several minutes, there are caches etc but the main problem is that golangci-lint doesn't own the lints, so it will never be as fast as something like Ruff.
It is fairly new so not well known but it is what powers go fix and go vet under the hood. And I believe the Go team is currently working on making it possible for module authors to easily describe their own custom analysis passes that would run automatically when running go fix.
It is extremely easy to define your own analysis.Analyzer struct that describes your own static analysis pass. You get access to all sorts of useful information such as the AST, types, even SSA info and you can even compose the information between analyzers. Then you can easily compile it into a binary and run it by passing that binary to go fix with a command line flag. The go toolchain itself handles all the complex caching logic so that your analyzers run fast.
Since it is made by the go team itself and part of the toolchain it should slowly become the unified standard you are looking for. So hopefully golangci-lint and others should eventually all unify under this framework.
You can easily give it a go by telling some AI agent to write some Go Analysis analyzers and telling them to drive them with go fix. My Go projects tend to accumulate a bunch of these to enforce all sorts of rules deterministically and automatically instead of some imprecise markdown file.