[wting]

Unused variables have nothing to do with memory safety. At most they'll take up some stack or heap space.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_safety

Memory safety is enforced in Go via best practices–like C and C++ ecosystems. However because of gc and channels race conditions happen less often in Go but there's no explicitly tooling to prevent them from happening:

http://research.swtch.com/gorace

[Kabukks]

You are right. I was thinking about the general fail-safety of my programs. Not letting me compile saved me from overlooking a (return) value more than once.

[threeseed]

You could accomplish the same thing by incorporating a code checker as part of your build process.

That way you would be catching a lot more code issues then just unused imports, variables etc.