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Comment by acedTrex | Hacker News Reader

What do you mean by no consistency in formatting? go fmt is a solid formatter that does its job

Go fmt is pretty good, but it's not ideal. My biggest gripe is imports. Go fmt will just sort imports alphabetically in lists that aren't separated by a blank line. Goimports will separate out core from 3rd party imports, unless you run it with the local flag then it'll add a third block of "local" imports.

But this spread means that it's not consistent across projects which style is preferred.

Some examples, based on cursory looking at big Go codebases: - Kubernetes, one of the biggest public-facing Go projects, uses the 3-block style https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/blob/master/pkg/con... - TIDB uses 2-block style https://github.com/pingcap/tidb/blob/master/pkg/ddl/placemen... - MinIO uses 2-block https://github.com/minio/minio/blob/master/internal/grid/con...

In all of those cases if you make a change and just run 'go fmt' it very well could inject any new imports in the first block, which would be wrong and you wouldn't know until project CI picks it up.

It sounds to me like there are some people who don't follow the style, rather than there not being a consistent style.

Which of those options do you view as 'the style'? One block, two blocks (core library and others), or three (core library, 3rd party, same-source-tree).

The first rule of any style guide should be "adhere to the conventions of surrounding code." So the answer to your question is it depends on what the convention in the file (and surrounding files) has already chosen. If there is only one grouping and you're adding enough imports that you have to choose between making two or three, then I would say use two because that is what the canonical & normative style guide recommends [0], but if you're working in an organization that has chosen to use goimports or has alternative guidance in its org-specific style guide then go ahead and make it three groups.

[0]: https://google.github.io/styleguide/go/decisions#import-grou...

Try gofumpt, it’s my default.

After using rustfmt, I feel gofmt is not up to snuff. My main gripe with it is there are multiple formattings that are valid: there is not one true format. E.g. gofmt does not enforce line length which makes diverging styles possible, like for function declarations.

Funnily, 1.5 decades after Golang popularized formatters, in 2024 it is the only language that I work in that requires me to think about formatting. Mostly line length, but super annoying.

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