In what way is gofmt remotely comparable to a JVM?

In reality the number of options is significantly smaller than the 1843 you mentioned. The list contains boatloads of duplicates because they exist for multiple architectures. E.g. BackgroundCompilation is present on 8 lines on the OpenJDK 25 page: aarch64, arm, ppc, riscv, s390, x86 and twice more without an architecture.

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avianlyric 8 hours ago | parent [-]

gofmt isn’t really comparable to the JVM, but it is a really strong expression of the opinionated tooling GoLang has.

While gofmt is “just” a formatting tool. The interesting part is that go code that doesn’t follow the go formatting standard is rejected by the go compiler. So not only does gofmt not have knobs, you can’t even fork it to add knobs, because the rest of the go ecosystem will outright reject code formatted in any other way.

It’s a rather extreme approach to opinionated tooling. But you can’t argue with the results, nobody writing go on any project ever worries about code formatting.

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parsd 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I don’t believe the Go compiler would reject unformatted code. The compiler has its own set of rules for what it views as syntactically correct code, but these rules have nothing to do with gofmt’s formatting rules.

For example, it’s the compiler and not gofmt that dictates that you must write a curly brace only on the same line of an “if” statement. If you put it on the next line, you don’t have unformatted code - you have a syntax error.

However, the compiler doesn’t care if you have too much whitespace between tokens or if you write your slice like []int{1, 2,3,4}, but gofmt does.

We could say the rules of the compiler and gofmt don’t even overlap.

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kfuse 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

They do worry, they just can't do anything about it. Like the fact that error handling code takes at least three lines no matter how trivial it is. I'm sure error handling would not be critisized nearly as much if it didn't consume so much vertical space and could fit in one line, which go compiler does allow.

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elric 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

That's all well and good, but entirely irrelevant to the number of options a JVM should reasonably have.

	▲	bram98 an hour ago \| parent [-]
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