Hello Gophers! During a Q&A session at this year's GopherCon, some members of the Go language team indicated a willingness to modify the behavior of range loops <https://github.com/golang/go/issues/20733> *if* we can be reasonably certain that the change will not cause incorrect behavior in current programs. To make that determination, a large collection of real-world go programs would need to be vetted. If we can find that, in every case, modifying the compiler behavior does not lead to an undesirable outcome, we will have strong evidence that the change may only have a small impact.
I've been working on a project to gather and crowdsource data for that sort of analysis. It has reached a point where I think that it's time to share it with the Go community. The GitHub Vet Project <https://github.com/github-vet> performs static analysis on public Go repositories hosted on GitHub in order to better understand the impact of this proposed language change <https://github.com/golang/go/issues/20733>. It consists of two bots. VetBot crawls GitHub to snippets of code it thinks could be interesting, it reports it as an issue in a separate repository <https://github.com/github-vet/rangeloop-pointer-findings>, for humans to analyze via crowdsourcing. TrackBot <https://github.com/github-vet/bots/tree/main/cmd/track-bot> manages the crowdsourcing workflow. At this point, all of the features I think are necessary for the project's success have been implemented. But I am only one Gopher, and so I would like to a) make the community aware of the project and b) ask the community to help review it in three ways: 1) Test out TrackBot and the project instructions by actually crowdsourcing through the issues found so far <https://github.com/github-vet/rangeloop-pointer-findings>. 2) Review the output <https://github.com/github-vet/rangeloop-pointer-findings/issues> and raise concern if anything that I claim ought to be excluded <https://github.com/github-vet/bots/tree/main/cmd/vet-bot#2-run-static-analysis> is somehow making it through. 3) Static analysis experts: review the analyzers <https://github.com/github-vet/bots/tree/main/cmd/vet-bot> and ruthlessly question anything that could lead to a false negative. I don't think anything exists, but one pair of eyes is often wrong, and there are many folks on this list with (much) more expertise than me. One final thing. The crowd-sourcing workflow I've designed relies on the opinion of experts to help estimate the reliability of the community assessment. In order for that to work, I need the help of some Go experts who are willing to commit some time to reviewing the findings. If you'd like to participate in this way, first, read the TrackBot documentation <https://github.com/github-vet/bots/tree/main/cmd/track-bot> to understand what being an expert entails. If you're still interested, email me with the subject line 'GitHub Vet Expert' and include your GitHub username and a brief outline of your experience with Go. It's my hope that this project can provide some data that can help to move Go forward. To that end, I'm also interested in any and all feedback and suggestions. Contributions are also welcome <https://github.com/github-vet/bots/issues>. Thanks for reading, K. Alex Mills, Ph.D -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "golang-nuts" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to golang-nuts+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/golang-nuts/CALJzkY86ZgQMQBqiAyDOKHHionjLZJbB6f%2BEDcMp82ZaPCKmXw%40mail.gmail.com.
