Hacked Together GoType

I think this is deprecated now, and you should probably use gopls

What this is

I took gotype from the master branch of Go's git repo and changed a few lines around to make it build in go 1.8.

I added the srcimporter from Go's master branch as well.

I added two flags to it (-origFilename and -modifiedFilename) to enable typechecking as you type in my editor.

I added a plugin for ALE to allow syntax checking in vim.

Why I made this

I used to use go build for my syntax checking needs. It had several issues:

• I often work in an environment where I cannot build what I'm working on locally due to cgo dependencies. This prevents me from using go build in most packages I work on.

• I find go build to be extremely resource intensive after doing a git pull or changing branches as it has to rebuild lots of dependencies.

• Go build only works after a file is saved. So my workflow involved a lot of unnecessary saving to see if my program typechecked.

This hacked up go type solves these problems:

• It uses the srcimporter rather than trying to compile packages, so packages that depend on C libraries can still be typechecked. Unfortunately, cgo bindings themselves cannot be typechecked.

• It is faster than go build.

• I've added arguments to support as-you-type typechecking.

Usage: Vim

• Download this project.

• Build gotype and put it somewhere on your PATH:

   go build .
   cp gotype ~/bin/
  

• Install ALE

• Put this project's root directory on your vim runtimepath. (I use Plug for this). In your vimrc:

   call plug#begin('~/.vim/plugged')
   ...
   Plug 'w0rp/ale'
   Plug '~/Downloads/gotype/'
   ...
   call plug#end()
  

• Configure ALE to use gotype on go files. In your vimrc:

   let g:ale_linters = {
   \   'go': ['gotype'],
   \}
  

• Try it out!

Usage: Emacs

I had a plugin that worked with emacs flycheck, but I've stopped maintaining it. It would be pretty trivial to get it working though.

Caveats

• Doesn't work directly on cgo code, returns spurious errors.
• Still fairly slow.

TODO

• cgo is not correctly handled.
• Implement checker as a persistant service that can cache unmodified packages. Experiments show a 2x performance improvement.