As your future colleague wondering what the hell that variable is for, thanks Go.

A quick “find all references” will point out it’s not used and can be deleted if it accidentally gets checked in but ideally, you have systems in place to not let it get checked into the main branch in the first place.

You mean a system like the compiler

Or a linter. Or code reviews. Or anything else. The nice thing is that if the compiler doesn’t demand something. The compiler should have the option to do it. The option could even be defaulted on. Afaik there is no way in Golang to disable that error (this is the line that does it: github.com/golang/go/blob/…/stmt.go#L67-L69). like --no-pedantics or such. Golang’s compiler openly refuses to give engineers more choices in what they think is the best system to handle it.

Who needs an option to leave unused variables around the code base? Lazybones?