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I went into the article thinking it was going to be about some way of renaming functions or something. Probably just my limited internal definition of the word refactor. After reading I would say Go has a cool built in way of using the adapter pattern. More interesting than renaming functions.

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Actually, Go makes this somewhat easy too. Check this: http://blog.golang.org/2013/01/go-fmt-your-code.html It's possible to do context aware source code substitutions. Works great. (Not that it's something new or groundbreaking though, just relevant to your expectation)

Comparing gofmt with what refactoring tools allow is too far fetched.

Are you aware of gofmt's rewrite rules?

http://golang.org/cmd/gofmt/#hdr-Examples

Pretty powerful stuff.

I am. Refactoring is much more than that:

- create functions and methods from code snippets

- merge duplicate code

- Semantic renaming of method names/variables/functions without affecting the same name being used in a different context

- convert field direct access to wrapper functions/methods

- remove dead code

- add missing code to interface/module/class where it is being applied

- validation of code references in comments

- ...

I thought it was going to be about go-fmt, which is really cool.

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