Tools Versions Save

This release fixes the following regressions in [email protected]+:

• golang/go#66490: occasional crashes when the imports cache is refreshed.
• golang/go#66425: spurious import errors in multi-root workspaces that have go.work replace directives.
• golang/go#66636: a crash in analysis when the go.mod contains a patch version and gopls was built with Go 1.20 or earlier.
• golang/go#66677: silent breakage when the go.mod file contains Go 1.22.x, and gopls was built with Go 1.21.x.
• golang/go#66731: a rare crash when diagnostics are erroneously positioned outside the file due to malformed syntax.
• golang/go#66647: a performance regression due to unnecessary reloading following "workspace/didChangeConfiguration" notifications. Under some not-yet-understood conditions, an apparent VS Code bug causes didChangeConfiguration notifications on every keystroke. With the zero-config logic of [email protected]+, any didChangeConfiguration notification causes gopls to re-evaluate (and reload) the set of builds it tracks. With the v0.15.3 release, gopls verifies that configuration actually changed. Special thanks to @gordallott for working with us to track down this bug.

This release fixes the following regressions in [email protected]+.

• golang/go#66109: a crash when encountering a test file excluded via build tags, which also contained an invalid import of a main package. This could occur in a tools_test.go file implementing the common pattern for tool dependencies.
• golang/go#66145: spurious import errors in multi-root workspaces. In some scenarios, the new zero-config logic added in [email protected] resulted in inaccurate errors about missing imports. This could occur when module A has a local replace of module B, and A and B are open as a separate workspace folders.
• golang/go#66195: a crash when working on modules with a go directive of the form go a.b.c, when gopls was compiled with Go 1.20 or earlier.
• golang/go#66090: a crash when SignatureHelp is cancelled (found via telemetry)
• golang/go#66250: a crash in references when one of the package files is missing a package declaration (found via telemetry)

These last two crashes are worth highlighting. Both were found via the (off by default) automated crash reporting added in [email protected]. Both were unlikely to get reported via GitHub issues, because they won't happen frequently enough for most LSP clients to notify the user. This is a perfect example of how telemetry can help us deliver a more reliable product than would be possible without automated reporting.

This release fixes golang/go#65952, a crash in document highlighting when the cursor is in a return value for a function that has no results, such as the following example:

func f() { // <-- no results
   return 0| // <-- cursor at '|'
}

Thanks very much to @patrickpichler who both reported and fixed this bug!

We're hopeful that once Go 1.23 is released, the opt-in automated crash reporting added in gopls v0.15.0 will increase the likelihood that these types of crashes are caught before they are released.

These release notes are mostly identical to the v0.15.0-pre.3 prerelease notes. Thanks to all who tested the prerelease!

go install golang.org/x/tools/[email protected]

This release introduces "zero config" gopls workspaces, which is a set of heuristics allowing gopls to Do The Right Thing when you open a Go file. We believe this addresses two of the largest pain points we hear about from our users: difficulty configuring multi-module repositories, and working on multiple GOOS/GOARCH combinations. However, this is a large change to the way gopls models your workspace, and the dynamic loading/unloading of builds may be surprising in some cases. Your feedback on this new feature is greatly appreciated. See below for more details.

New Features

Simpler workspace configuration and improved build tag support

The headline feature of this release is a rewrite of gopls's logic for associating files with build configurations that enables gopls to give accurate answers when navigating almost any Go source file on your machine.

Most features of gopls rely on type information, which comes not from the file in isolation but depends on the relationship between the file and the other files in its package, and between the package and all its dependencies; this in turn depends on go.mod and go.work files. In effect, gopls needs to decide which go build command--which working directory, package arguments, GOOS, GOARCH, build tags, and so on--would cause each file to be processed by the compiler.

Previous versions of gopls only allowed one build per workspace folder, and users had to be careful to configure the right workspace root and build environment. As a result, users often encountered confusing error messages when they opened the wrong directory, or a file that was tagged for a different operating system or architecture--the dreaded "No packages found" error. This situation was improved by the introduction of go.work files, but still required configuration and a preexisting understanding of the code being edited.

With this release, gopls now allows multiple builds per workspace, and uses heuristics to automatically derive the set of active builds. Gopls will ensure that an active build contains every module with an open file in your workspace, adding new builds and GOOS/GOARCH combinations as needed to cover files that don't match the host operating system or architecture.

For example, suppose we had a repository with three modules: moda, modb, and modc, and a go.work file using modules moda and modb. If we open the files moda/a.go, modb/b.go, moda/a_windows.go, and modc/c.go, gopls will automatically create three builds:

This allows gopls to just work when you open a Go file, but it does come with several caveats:

• This causes gopls to do more work, since it is now tracking three builds instead of one. However, the recent scalability redesign allows much of this work to be avoided through efficient caching.
• For operations invoked from a given file, such as "References" and "Implementations", gopls executes the operation in the default build for that file. For example, finding references to a symbol S from foo_linux.go will return references from the Linux build, and finding references to the same symbol S from foo_windows.go will return references from the Windows build. Gopls searches the default build for the file, but it doesn't search all the other possible builds because it is liable to be too expensive. golang/go#65757 and golang/go#65755 propose improvements to this behavior.
• When selecting a GOOS/GOARCH combination to match a build-constrained file, gopls will choose the first matching combination from this list. In some cases, that may be surprising.
• When working in a GOOS/GOARCH constrained file that does not match your default toolchain, CGO_ENABLED=0 is implicitly set, since a C toolchain for that target is unlikely to be available. This means that gopls will not work in files including import "C". golang/go#65758 may lead to improvements in this behavior.
• Gopls is currently unable to guess build flags that include arbitrary user-defined build constraints. For example, if you are trying to work on a file that is constrained by the build directive //go:build special, gopls will not guess that it needs to create a build with "buildFlags": ["-tags=special"]. golang/go#65089 proposes a heuristic by which gopls could handle this automatically.

Please provide feedback on this behavior by upvoting or commenting the issues mentioned above, or opening a new issue for other improvements you'd like to see.

Preview refactoring edits

Refactoring code actions now support resolving edits. This update enables features like code action previews within VS Code (triggered by Ctrl+Enter).

To take advantage of this new gopls feature, clients must register support via:

{
	"textDocument": {
		"codeAction": {
			"dataSupport": true,
			"resolveSupport": {
				"properties": ["edit"]
			}
		}
	}
}

Analysis & diagnostics

This release includes two new analyzers:

• The nilness analyzer reports mistakes relating to nil pointers. (In previous releases it was off by default because it was too computationally expensive, but it has since been optimized.)

• The unusedparams analyzer reports when a parameter is unused, and offers quick fixes to either rename it to _ or to remove it completely and update all callers. (This analyzer was also previously off by default because it was too imprecise, but it has been rewritten to eliminate nearly all false positives.)

Automated crash reporting (off by default)

The v1.23 release of Go expected in August contains a feature that makes it possible for a Go program to monitor itself for unexpected crashes of any kind. When gopls is built with the latest Go toolchain, it will enable this feature and save crash reports into the local telemetry database.

If you have elected to enable data collection by running this command:

$ go run golang.org/x/telemetry/cmd/gotelemetry@latest on

then these crash reports will be uploaded to https://telemetry.go.dev, helping us identify crashes and quickly fix them.

We respect your privacy. The crash reports contain only stack traces, that is, lists of names of functions from the gopls source code. They do not contain any values derived from your source code or environment.

The v0.14 release of gopls reported limited telemetry data about a handful of sites in the code where we had added explicit assertions. We are grateful to users who enabled telemetry as even this limited data proved tremendously valuable and led to numerous bug fixes.

Housekeeping

Finishing up the redesign work from v0.12, we've made a number of clarifications to the internal structure of the project, including rationalizing the directory layout, breaking dependencies, minimizing and documenting our internal APIs, and converging our tests on a standard form. We believe it is now easier than ever before to contribute features to gopls, and have been heartened by an uptick in contributions from the broader community, including:

• improved postfix completion (golang/go#64178, golang/go#64037, golang/go#59689);
• improved completion of return statements (golang/go#64266);
• a new code action (refactoring) for conversion between raw and interpreted string literals (golang/go#51200);
• updating of doc links when renaming a symbol (golang/go#64495);
• semantic highlighting for go: directives (golang/go#63538)

Bug fixes

In addition to the new features listed above, this release includes numerous minor ones, including:

• The "add missing imports" feature (typically invoked on save) is much less likely to block, a commonly reported source of freezing following a save (golang/go#59216).
• Hovering over a type now displays the set of accessible fields and methods, even though embedded fields (golang/go#61634).
• gopls supports "workspace vendoring" (golang/go#63375).
• Completion now substitutes type arguments in generic snippets when they are known (golang/go#61189).
• Completion now omits type parameters when they can be inferred from the arguments (golang/go#51783).

A major theme for this release is stability: we have fixed a large number of crash bugs.

A full list of all issues fixed can be found in the gopls/v0.15.0 milestone. To report a new problem, please file a new issue at https://go.dev/issues/new.

End of support for Go 1.18

This is the last release of gopls that may be built and used with Go 1.18. If built or used with Go 1.18, it will display a message advising the user to upgrade. See supported Go versions for details.

Thank you to our contributors!

@achenet, @adonovan, @bcmills, @Deiz, @hyangah, @pjweinb, @qiulaidongfeng, @qmuntal, @rogeryk, @stapelberg, @suzmue, @timothy-king, @tttoad, @vikblom, @zpavlinovic

These are release notes for a prerelease version of gopls. v0.15.0 will be released soon, but please try the prerelease if you can!

go install golang.org/x/tools/[email protected]

This release introduces "zero config" gopls, which is a set of heuristics allowing gopls to Do The Right Thing when you open a Go file. We believe this addresses the two largest pain points we hear about from our users: difficulty configuring multi-module repositories, and working on multiple GOOS/GOARCH combinations. However, this is a large change to the way gopls models your workspace, and the dynamic loading/unloading of builds may be surprising in some cases. Your feedback on this new feature is greatly appreciated. See below for more details.

New Features

Simpler workspace configuration and improved build tag support

The headline feature of this release is a rewrite of gopls's logic for associating files with build configurations that enables gopls to give accurate answers when navigating almost any Go source file on your machine.

Most features of gopls rely on type information, which comes not from the file in isolation but depends on the relationship between the file and the other files in its package, and between the package and all its dependencies; this in turn depends on go.mod and go.work files. In effect, gopls needs to decide which go build command--which working directory, package arguments, GOOS, GOARCH, build tags, and so on--would cause each file to be processed by the compiler.

Previous versions of gopls only allowed one build per workspace folder, and users had to be careful to configure the right workspace root and build environment. As a result, users often encountered confusing error messages when they opened the wrong directory, or a file that was tagged for a different operating system or architecture--the dreaded "No packages found" error. This situation was improved by the introduction of go.work files, but still required configuration and a preexisting understanding of the code being edited.

With this release, gopls now allows multiple builds per workspace, and uses heuristics to automatically derive the set of active builds. Gopls will ensure that an active build contains every module with an open file in your workspace, adding new builds and GOOS/GOARCH combinations as needed to cover files that don't match the host operating system or architecture.

For example, suppose we had a repository with three modules: moda, modb, and modc, and a go.work file using modules moda and modb. If we open the files moda/a.go, modb/b.go, moda/a_windows.go, and modc/c.go, gopls will automatically create three builds:

In some cases this may cause gopls to do more work, since gopls is now tracking three builds instead of one. However, the scalability redesign we first announced in v0.12 allows us to avoid most of this work by efficient caching in a persistent store.

So, all gopls' navigation, query, analysis, and refactoring features should work equally well in both files. Notably, you'll see compiler diagnostics for the appropriate build in real time, making it much easier to make changes to cross-platform code.

Preview refactoring edits

Refactoring code actions now support resolving edits. This update enables features like code action previews within VS Code (triggered by Ctrl+Enter).

To take advantage of this new gopls feature, clients must register support via:

{
	"textDocument": {
		"codeAction": {
			"dataSupport": true,
			"resolveSupport": {
				"properties": ["edit"]
			}
		}
	}
}

Analysis & diagnostics

This release includes two new analyzers:

• The nilness analyzer reports mistakes relating to nil pointers. (In previous releases it was off by default because it was too computationally expensive, but it has since been optimized.)

• The unusedparams analyzer reports when a parameter is unused, and offers quick fixes to either rename it to _ or to remove it completely and update all callers. (This analyzer was also previously off by default because it was too imprecise, but it has been rewritten to eliminate nearly all false positives.)

Automated crash reporting (off by default)

The v1.23 release of Go expected in August contains a feature that makes it possible for a Go program to monitor itself for unexpected crashes of any kind. When gopls is built with the latest Go toolchain, it will enable this feature and save crash reports into the local telemetry database.

If you have elected to enable data collection by running this command:

$ go run golang.org/x/telemetry/cmd/gotelemetry@latest on

then these crash reports will be uploaded to https://telemetry.go.dev, helping us identify crashes and quickly fix them.

We respect your privacy. The crash reports contain only stack traces, that is, lists of names of functions from the gopls source code. They do not contain any values derived from your source code or environment.

The v0.14 release of gopls reported limited telemetry data about a handful of sites in the code where we had added explicit assertions. We are grateful to users who enabled telemetry as even this limited data proved tremendously valuable and led to numerous bug fixes.

Housekeeping

Finishing up the redesign work from v0.12, we've made a number of clarifications to the internal structure of the project, including rationalizing the directory layout, breaking dependencies, minimizing and documenting our internal APIs, and converging our tests on a standard form. We believe it is now easier than ever before to contribute features to gopls, and have been heartened by an uptick in contributions from the broader community, including:

• improved postfix completion (golang/go#64178, golang/go#64037, golang/go#59689);
• improved completion of return statements (golang/go#64266);
• a new code action (refactoring) for conversion between raw and interpreted string literals (golang/go#51200);
• updating of doc links when renaming a symbol (golang/go#64495);
• semantic highlighting for go: directives (golang/go#63538)

Bug fixes

In addition to the new features listed above, this release includes numerous minor ones, including:

• The "add missing imports" feature (typically invoked on save) is much less likely to block, a commonly reported source of freezing following a save (golang/go#59216).
• Hovering over a type now displays the set of accessible fields and methods, even though embedded fields (golang/go#61634).
• gopls supports "workspace vendoring" (golang/go#63375).
• Completion now substitutes type arguments in generic snippets when they are known (golang/go#61189).
• Completion now omits type parameters when they can be inferred from the arguments (golang/go#51783).

A major theme for this release is stability: we have fixed a large number of crash bugs.

A full list of all issues fixed can be found in the gopls/v0.15.0 milestone. To report a new problem, please file a new issue at https://go.dev/issues/new.

End of support for Go 1.18

This is the last release of gopls that may be built and used with Go 1.18. If built or used with Go 1.18, it will display a message advising the user to upgrade. See supported Go versions for details.

This release contains just one change: an upgrade of x/telemetry to pick up support for the "local" telemetry mode (golang/go#63832).

Previously, when the telemetry mode was "off" (the default), counter data would not be uploaded, but would be written to the os.UserConfigDir()/go/telemetry/local directory of the local file system. We heard from a few users that, as a matter of policy within their organization, they need a way to prevent even this local data from being written. With this release, running gotelemetry off will stop gopls from writing this local counter data. Note that the os.UserConfigDir()/go/telemetry/mode file must be written to record the "off" state.

The new default telemetry mode is "local", which behaves the same way as "off" did before. In "local" mode, counter data is written to the local file system, but not uploaded. Local data can be inspected with the gotelemetry view command.

See golang/go#63832 for more details. Thanks again for helping us support transparent telemetry in gopls. As described in the v0.14.0 release notes, we are confident that this data will help us produce a better, faster, more reliable product. In fact this is already happening.

This release contains just two changes:

• A workaround for a regression affecting some users of GOPACKAGESDRIVER: golang/go#63751, for example those using gopls with an older version of Bazel. When the go/packages driver is missing compiler or architecture information, gopls now assumes a default value rather than failing to load package information.
• A fix for a minor bug in the new "remove unused parameter" refactoring: golang/go#63755. Notably, this bug was discovered via an automated report from someone who had opted in to Go telemetry.

These are release notes are identical to the v0.14.0-pre.4 prerelease notes. Thanks to all who tested the prerelease!

go install golang.org/x/tools/[email protected]

This release includes initial support for the "inline call to function" refactoring, as well as a few other smaller features. It also includes several bug fixes, notably a fix for a performance regression in completion that may be significant in some environments.

The release also contains support for opt-in telemetry. If you want, you can enable the periodic uploading of telemetry data, including gopls stack traces and metrics, but never your source code, to telemetry.go.dev. See below for details.

New Features

Refactoring: inline call to function

This release includes a new code action to inline function calls:

While the outcome of this operation may be a simple replacement, there's a lot going on under the covers. For example, the new inliner checks whether changes to the order of argument evaluation could have unintended consequences. If so, it is careful to replicate the original behavior:

add preserves the order of effects	...but sub does not

The goal of the inliner is to rewrite your code idiomatically without introducing behavior changes. See the inlining documentation for more details.

When the call cannot be reduced to a simple expression, the inliner may fall back on an immediately invoked function literal (func() { statements }()) as this is often the only way to preserve the original behavior. As we continue to work on refactoring, we'll add additional rewriting strategies that avoid this fall-back in more cases.

Refactoring: removing unused parameters

The techniques described in the previous section serve as a foundation for other refactoring operations. As a proof of concept, this release also includes a code action to remove unused parameters. Since this operation uses inlining behind the scenes, it gets all of the related safety checks and rewriting strategies for free:

Improved support for go:embed directives

This release includes improved support for //go:embed directives, including hover and jump-to-definition.

New analyses

This release include three new static analyses, all of which are enabled by default.

"appends": reports calls to append that pass no values to be appended to the slice.

"defers": checks for common mistakes in defer statements.

"slog": checks for invalid structured logging calls.

Opt-in telemetry

This is the first gopls release to include opt-in transparent telemetry. Telemetry uploading is off by default, and can be enabled with the following command:

go run golang.org/x/telemetry/cmd/gotelemetry@latest on

After telemetry is enabled, gopls will periodically upload metrics and stack traces to telemetry.go.dev. If we get enough adoption, this data can significantly advance the pace of gopls development and help us meet a higher standard of reliability. For example:

• Even with semi-automated crash reports in VS Code, we've seen several crashers go unreported for weeks or months.
• Even with a suite of benchmarks, some performance regressions don't show up in our benchmark environment (such as the completion bug mentioned below!).
• Even with lots of great ideas for how to improve gopls, we have limited resources. Telemetry can help us identify which new features are most important, and which existing features aren't being used or aren't working well.

These are just a few ways that telemetry can improve gopls. The telemetry blog post series contains many more.

Go telemetry is designed to be transparent and privacy-preserving. If you have concerns about enabling telemetry, you can learn more at https://telemetry.go.dev/privacy.

Bugfixes

• Completion latency: the most notable bug fixed in this release is a regression in completion latency that first appeared in [email protected]. This bug relates to scanning the module cache for completion of functions in unimported packages, so in environments where this operation is slow, completion latency was markedly higher. Thanks @myitcv for the detailed bug report that allowed us to root cause this regression.

A full list of all issues fixed can be found in the gopls/v0.14.0 milestone. To report a new problem, please file a new issue at https://go.dev/issues/new.

Thank you to our contributors!

@adonovan @bcmills @cuishang @cuonglm @dmitshur @ericlohyg @findleyr @hyangah @jba @lfolger @nchengyeeshen @pjweinb @qiulaidongfeng @telemachus @timothy-king @tttoad @vikblom

These are release notes for a prerelease version of gopls. v0.14.0 will be released soon, but please try the prerelease if you can!

go install golang.org/x/tools/[email protected]

This release includes initial support for the "inline call to function" refactoring, as well as a few other smaller features. It also includes several bug fixes, notably a fix for a performance regression in completion that may be significant in some environments.

The release also contains support for opt-in telemetry. If you want, you can enable the periodic uploading of telemetry data, including gopls stack traces and metrics, but never your source code, to telemetry.go.dev. See below for details.

New Features

Refactoring: inline call to function

This release includes a new code action to inline function calls:

While the outcome of this operation may be a simple replacement, there's a lot going on under the covers. For example, the new inliner checks whether changes to the order of argument evaluation could have unintended consequences. If so, it is careful to replicate the original behavior:

add preserves the order of effects	...but sub does not

The goal of the inliner is to rewrite your code idiomatically without introducing behavior changes. See the inlining documentation for more details.

When the call cannot be reduced to a simple expression, the inliner may fall back on an immediately invoked function literal (func() { statements }()) as this is often the only way to preserve the original behavior. As we continue to work on refactoring, we'll add additional rewriting strategies that avoid this fall-back in more cases.

Refactoring: removing unused parameters

The techniques described in the previous section serve as a foundation for other refactoring operations. As a proof of concept, this release also includes a code action to remove unused parameters. Since this operation uses inlining behind the scenes, it gets all of the related safety checks and rewriting strategies for free:

Improved support for go:embed directives

This release includes improved support for //go:embed directives, including hover and jump-to-definition.

New analyses

This release include three new static analyses, all of which are enabled by default.

"appends": reports calls to append that pass no values to be appended to the slice.

"defers": checks for common mistakes in defer statements.

"slog": checks for invalid structured logging calls.

Opt-in telemetry

This is the first gopls release to include opt-in transparent telemetry. Telemetry uploading is off by default, and can be enabled with the following command:

go run golang.org/x/telemetry/cmd/gotelemetry@latest on

After telemetry is enabled, gopls will periodically upload metrics and stack traces to telemetry.go.dev. If we get enough adoption, this data can significantly advance the pace of gopls development and help us meet a higher standard of reliability. For example:

• Even with semi-automated crash reports in VS Code, we've seen several crashers go unreported for weeks or months.
• Even with a suite of benchmarks, some performance regressions don't show up in our benchmark environment (such as the completion bug mentioned below!).
• Even with lots of great ideas for how to improve gopls, we have limited resources. Telemetry can help us identify which new features are most important, and which existing features aren't being used or aren't working well.

These are just a few ways that telemetry can improve gopls. The telemetry blog post series contains many more.

Go telemetry is designed to be transparent and privacy-preserving. If you have concerns about enabling telemetry, you can learn more at https://telemetry.go.dev/privacy.

Bugfixes

• Completion latency: the most notable bug fixed in this release is a regression in completion latency that first appeared in [email protected]. This bug relates to scanning the module cache for completion of functions in unimported packages, so in environments where this operation is slow, completion latency was markedly higher. Thanks @myitcv for the detailed bug report that allowed us to root cause this regression.

A full list of all issues fixed can be found in the gopls/v0.14.0 milestone. To report a new problem, please file a new issue at https://go.dev/issues/new.

Thank you to our contributors!

@adonovan @bcmills @cuishang @cuonglm @dmitshur @ericlohyg @findleyr @hyangah @jba @lfolger @nchengyeeshen @pjweinb @qiulaidongfeng @telemachus @timothy-king @tttoad @vikblom

This release includes just one change: a fix for a new crash when renaming methods in certain packages (golang/go#61813).