Linters and analysers areas of responsibility

[Antonboom]

Hello, mates!

Every day I see more and more overlap between different meta-linters.

Question, maybe somewhere on the net there is a summary table of which meta-linters are responsible for what exactly? And what are their development strategies

1. gometalinter –> golangci-lint, orchestrator
2. go vet, finds real bugs not caught by the compiler
3. golint -> revive @mgechev @alexandear, the responsibility is not clear
4. gocritic @cristaloleg @quasilyte, the responsibility is not clear
5. staticcheck @dominikh, the responsibility is not clear

I would appreciate any knowledge on this matter, thank you

[ldez]

Each "meta-linter" is independent; there are no specific responsibilities.

As golangci-lint maintainers, we should not define any scope or responsibilities to projects outside golangci-lint.
This is not our role; we must respect the independence of each project.

[Antonboom]

This is not our role; we must respect the independence of each project.

I apologize for misleading you. Most likely some Go forum would have been more suitable for such a question, because I didn't ask it in the context of golangci-lint, the architecture and purpose of which is obvious and clear (unlike competing meta-linters, launched by it). This place just has the highest concentration of people from the Go linter ecosystem 😄

So I asked in the hope of finding out the opinion of the authors themselves and to have an answer to similar questions from my colleagues. But not with the purpose of setting some kind of limits for someone and validate them 👌

[cristaloleg]

which meta-linters are responsible for what exactly

Improving code, no?

[Antonboom]

despite on fact that improving is already done / can be done in other tool?

[alexandear]

Revive was originally developed in 2017 by @mgechev as a golint replacement. He later added a few additional rules that were turned off by default. @mgechev had a vision for the future, but I don't know the details.

In 2018, @chavacava contributed many new rules and became an active contributor. @mgechev stopped away from the development, and @chavacava brought his vision for Revive.

I became a maintainer of Revive in. Since the project had already been evolving for 6 years, I can't impose my own vision entirely.

Currently, we accept all PR that adds useful rules in the categories of style, bugs, logic, and optimization (see categories). We stay away from the security area, since gosec is better suited for that.

Revive can also be used outside golangci-lint, so sometimes we accept rules that duplicate existing linters in golangci-lint.