# README

The advanced Go linter

Staticcheck is a state of the art linter for the Go programming language. Using static analysis, it finds bugs and performance issues, offers simplifications, and enforces style rules.

Financial support by private and corporate sponsors guarantees the tool's continued development. Please become a sponsor if you or your company rely on Staticcheck.

Documentation

You can find extensive documentation on Staticcheck on its website.

Installation

Releases

It is recommended that you run released versions of the tools. These releases can be found as git tags (e.g. 2019.1) as well as prebuilt binaries in the releases tab.

The easiest way of using the releases from source is to use a Go package manager such as Godep or Go modules. Alternatively you can use a combination of git clone -b and go get to check out the appropriate tag and download its dependencies.

Master

You can also run the master branch instead of a release. Note that while the master branch is usually stable, it may still contain new checks or backwards incompatible changes that break your build. By using the master branch you agree to become a beta tester.

Tools

All of the following tools can be found in the cmd/ directory. Each tool is accompanied by its own README, describing it in more detail.

Tool	Description
keyify	Transforms an unkeyed struct literal into a keyed one.
rdeps	Find all reverse dependencies of a set of packages
staticcheck	Go static analysis, detecting bugs, performance issues, and much more.
structlayout	Displays the layout (field sizes and padding) of structs.
structlayout-optimize	Reorders struct fields to minimize the amount of padding.
structlayout-pretty	Formats the output of structlayout with ASCII art.

Libraries

In addition to the aforementioned tools, this repository contains the libraries necessary to implement these tools.

Unless otherwise noted, none of these libraries have stable APIs. Their main purpose is to aid the implementation of the tools. If you decide to use these libraries, please vendor them and expect regular backwards-incompatible changes.