x/tools/gopls: check spelling of identifiers in declarations

[adonovan]

It would be nice if gopls could reliably point out misspellings in declarations (but not in references, where it is just a nuisance), while being aware of Go conventions for capitalization, word breaking, and local project naming conventions. An analyzer seems like the easiest integration. (Semantic tokens doesn't have a "misspelled" modifier, nor the means to suggest a fix.)

One way to do this is to develop something from scratch, but I bet there are spell checkers out there that we could reuse. The tricky part will be to define a loosely coupled interface to avoid x/tools from having to add a dependency on them.

[thediveo]

There are already many linters and spell checkers with Go support out there.

Spell checkers are in my experience notoriously bad, especially when groaning over well-established domain terminology they beg to differ.

Then, there are enough situations where identifiers will follow rules outside the realm of Go (with the exception of exportability in some cases) and there forcing Go rules upon devs will cause devs to either not find the identifiers or consider Go as a policing tool they will then avoid for other languages that are not inflicting narrow rules.

This all creates unnecessary noise ... and that's exactly what devs don't need and don't want.

[adonovan]

Thanks for the information. I agree we should not introduce this feature unless its false positive rate is very low. I wonder what is the state of the art of inferring the local conventions, respecting necessity (e.g. protoc-generated unconventional capitalizatons), etc. Seems like a machine learning (not specifically LLM) problem.