Launched by Google developers in 2009, Go, also known as Golang, is an open-source procedural programming language similar to C syntactically, but has memory safety along with garbage collection. Since its introduction, the language has been increasing in popularity. According to the Stack Overflow Developer Survey, in 2022, 10.5% of developers used Go as their primary programming language.
The language consists of only 25 keywords making it a minimalist, modern, and simple architecture and is therefore suitable for service-oriented architectures with high-scalability.
So, if you are a developer who works on Go, or is planning to shift to Go, here are the top tools you can use for development.
Apicompat
Designed for developers to detect backwards and incompatible changes, along with exported declarations, Apicompat offers significant advantages for detecting false positives. It is very easy to implement in the code using the command line provided in the GitHub repository and a completely integrable library. It is still a considerably new tool and receives constant updates and fixes.
Click here for the GitHub repository.
Checkstyle
A famous tool for developing JavaScript libraries for GoLang, Checkstyle’s repository offers developers the ability to check their source code. In addition to checking code layout and formatting, the tool is efficient for finding method and class design problems. The tool outputs a list of suggestions for your code, and developers can decide what to select.
Click here for the GitHub repository.
Go-Swagger
An implementation of OpenAI’s Swagger 2.0 built for Go, Go-Swagger is a simple and powerful tool for serialising swagger specification. Swagger has one of the largest ecosystems of API tooling for every programming language. Through this tool, developers can generate server, clients, command line tools, from a swagger specification on Go.
Click here for the GitHub repository.
Grapes
Grapes is a lightweight tool for distribution of commands over Secure Shell (SSH) with ease. After recent updates, the tool enables Handshake validation with complete host key validation. The author, Yaron Sumel maintains regular updates for the repository with fixes and improvements.
Click here for the GitHub repository.
Staticcheck
The state-of-the-art linter for Go, Staticcheck, as the name suggests, uses static analysis to find bugs and other performance issues while offering simplifications for code in the language. The repository includes several other tools like keyify for transforming unkeyed struct literal, structlayout, for displaying layout, and two more formatting tools.
Click here for the GitHub repository.
Read: 9 Best Tools for Python Developers
Go-Callvis
Go-callvis is a web development tool providing a visual overview of call graphs for Go programs in Graphviz’s dot format. The tool is extremely useful for large projects with large codebases and helps in explaining projects to others with simple interactive graphs. It works with pointer analysis for construction of the graph.
Click here for the GitHub repository.
GoNative
A simple tool for creating a complete architecture and building Go toolchains for cross compilation to all platforms. GoNative provides end-to-end support for solving complex problems apart from development of apps. It has a 97 percent approval rate on PlayStore and AppStore and does not require unnecessary rebuilds.
Click here for the GitHub repository.
Depth
Another useful tool for web developers to retrieve and visualise Go source code by measuring the depth of dependency trees, Depth can be used as a single command line application or also as a package within the project. For specific changes, developers can set appropriate flags for the perfect output before resolving.
Click here for the GitHub repository.
Go Linter
This one initially worked as Go Meta Linter, which was archived four years ago on GitHub. Go Linter is for running lint tools parallel using caching and producing concurrent outputs. It also integrates IDE and text editors like Atom, Sublime linter, Neovim, and Visual Studio Code, while also supporting configuration files like JSON.
Click here for the GitHub repository.