Reduce golint min_confidence to default 0.8

[jayvdb]

The current golint level of 1.0 causes several test cases to become errors, mostly due to capitalisation and docstrings.

However the default of 0.8 causes many more errors.

[adsharma]

Did you look at gometalint? It looks unlikely that we'll have a comment on every global variable in tests.

golang/lint#186

After the upcoming diff, the only lint errors at confidence=1.0 are missing comments.

[adsharma]

Or staticcheck. golint is deprecated and frozen.

golang/go#38968

[jayvdb]

Used gometalint a bit when I was doing go; it used to manage their own fork of go tools which were no longer supported by the go team. I dont know staticcheck - from a quick scan of https://staticcheck.io/ it looks like a decent general purpose tool, which is suffice to replace golint.

[jayvdb]

gometalinter is deprecated, and they recommend https://github.com/golangci/golangci-lint , which is in brew https://formulae.brew.sh/formula/golangci-lint, so is staticcheck. Neither are in chocolatey.

[jayvdb]

staticcheck complains about assert.go

assert not (0 == 1)

becomes

if !(!(0 == 1)) {
    panic("assert")
}

and staticcheck error:

cases/assert.go:11:5: negating a boolean twice has no effect; is this a typo? (SA4013)

[jayvdb]

On macos, the default linters for golangci-lint are

Enabled by default linters:
deadcode: Finds unused code [fast: false, auto-fix: false]
errcheck: Errcheck is a program for checking for unchecked errors in go programs. These unchecked errors can be critical bugs in some cases [fast: false, auto-fix: false]
gosimple (megacheck): Linter for Go source code that specializes in simplifying a code [fast: false, auto-fix: false]
govet (vet, vetshadow): Vet examines Go source code and reports suspicious constructs, such as Printf calls whose arguments do not align with the format string [fast: false, auto-fix: false]
ineffassign: Detects when assignments to existing variables are not used [fast: true, auto-fix: false]
staticcheck (megacheck): Staticcheck is a go vet on steroids, applying a ton of static analysis checks [fast: false, auto-fix: false]
structcheck: Finds unused struct fields [fast: false, auto-fix: false]
typecheck: Like the front-end of a Go compiler, parses and type-checks Go code [fast: false, auto-fix: false]
unused (megacheck): Checks Go code for unused constants, variables, functions and types [fast: false, auto-fix: false]
varcheck: Finds unused global variables and constants [fast: false, auto-fix: false]

In addition to the error from staticcheck about assert.go, the other errors from golangci-lint are all from deadcode which is quite rightly pointing out that our test cases have dead code, c.f. #123

coverage.go:

cases/coverage.go:17:6: `InlineEllipsis` is unused (deadcode)
func InlineEllipsis() {
     ^
cases/coverage.go:31:6: `InferBool` is unused (deadcode)
func InferBool(code int) bool {
     ^

global2.go:

cases/global2.go:9:5: `Code1` is unused (deadcode)
var Code1 int = 1
    ^
cases/global2.go:13:5: `LC` is unused (deadcode)
var LC = map[string]int{CodeB: Code0}
    ^

infer_ops.go:

cases/infer_ops.go:35:6: `Add1` is unused (deadcode)
func Add1(x int8, y int8) int16 {
     ^
cases/infer_ops.go:39:6: `Add2` is unused (deadcode)
func Add2(x int16, y int16) int32 {
     ^
cases/infer_ops.go:43:6: `Add3` is unused (deadcode)
func Add3(x int32, y int32) int64 {
     ^
cases/infer_ops.go:47:6: `Add4` is unused (deadcode)
func Add4(x int64, y int64) int64 {
     ^
cases/infer_ops.go:51:6: `Add5` is unused (deadcode)
func Add5(x uint8, y uint8) uint16 {
     ^
cases/infer_ops.go:55:6: `Add6` is unused (deadcode)
func Add6(x uint16, y uint16) uint32 {
     ^
cases/infer_ops.go:59:6: `Add7` is unused (deadcode)
func Add7(x uint32, y uint32) uint64 {
     ^
cases/infer_ops.go:63:6: `Add8` is unused (deadcode)
func Add8(x uint64, y uint64) uint64 {
     ^
cases/infer_ops.go:67:6: `Add9` is unused (deadcode)
func Add9(x int8, y uint16) uint32 {
     ^
cases/infer_ops.go:71:6: `Sub` is unused (deadcode)
func Sub(x int8, y int8) int8 {
     ^
cases/infer_ops.go:75:6: `Mul` is unused (deadcode)
func Mul(x int8, y int8) int16 {
     ^

[jayvdb]

Another tool we could use is https://github.com/SonarSource/slang , part of SonarQube, and usable as a github action with https://github.com/kitabisa/sonarqube-action .

sonarqube is available on brew, and chocolatey has some packages but they might not be suitable, as the official packages are MSBuild/.Net specific, and the other packages look a bit dodgy