proposal: x/tools/go/analysis: Expose something like internal/checker.Run

[cszczepaniak]

Proposal Details

The analysis package is really great for writing custom analyzers. It has also become my go-to tool for performing large-scale refactors that are more involved than a find/replace, leveraging suggested fixes + -fix. Sometimes find myself wanting to write custom tools which leverage golang.org/x/tools/go/analysis and applying suggested fixes but don't necessarily look exactly like running an analyzer via singlechecker.Main or multichecker.Main from the user's standpoint (i.e. different flags, different handling of os.Stdout, os.Stderr).

It would be really handy if there was a function similar to golang.org/x/tools/go/analysis/internal/checker.Run that I could call from my own code given an analyzer and that would return an error rather than an exit code. It would ideally also not print to os.Stdout or os.Stderr on its own (or at least accept io.Writers for these that I can provide).

Or maybe there's a better/similar way to inspect parsed/type-checked packages and transform the original source in some fashion that I'm not aware of? I've used astutil in the past for this as well, but I find the SuggestedFixes API to be much simpler to use.

[gabyhelp]

Related Issues and Documentation

• x/tools/go/analysis: feature request: need a way of accessing analysis results from another go package #50265 (closed)
• x/tools/go/analysis/internal: Add an option to emit diagnostics for external packages #38177
• x/tools/go/analysis/checker: an importable analysis driver based on go/packages #61324
• x/tools/go/{analysis,packages}: expose TypeErrors []types.Error fields #54619 (closed)
• proposal: x/tools/go/analysis/analysistest: improved, module-aware API #61336

_{(Emoji vote if this was helpful or unhelpful; more detailed feedback welcome in this discussion.)}

[ianlancetaylor]

CC @alandonovan

[cszczepaniak]

This seems like it was previously accepted in #61324 (after a quick glance I couldn't tell if it specifically supported applying suggested fixes or not, but presumably it would or could) but hasn't moved too much since then -- I see a few other subsequent issues mentioned that original issue as well, so I suppose you can count this as one more vote for getting that to land!

[adonovan]

Indeed, it has been proposed and accepted, and two years ago I even had a bunch of CLs to do the necessary reorganization, but they have since become stale. I've been meaning to spend a couple of hours to redo them but there had been little sign that anyone was waiting, so it wasn't a priority. I'll try to get to it this month.

[seankhliao]

I'll close since there's already a proposal and just needs implementation / review.