Tools: Free Using Go Fix To Modernize Go Code 2026

The 1.26 release of Go this month includes a completely rewritten go fix subcommand. Go fix uses a suite of algorithms to identify opportunities to improve your code, often by taking advantage of more modern features of the language and library. In this post, we’ll first show you how to use go fix to modernize your Go codebase. Then in the second section we’ll dive into the infrastructure behind it and how it is evolving. Finally, we’ll present the theme of “self-service” analysis tools to help module maintainers and organizations encode their own guidelines and best practices.

The go fix command, like go build and go vet, accepts a set of patterns that denote packages. This command fixes all packages beneath the current directory:

On success, it silently updates your source files. It discards any fix that touches generated files since the appropriate fix in that case is to the logic of the generator itself. We recommend running go fix over your project each time you update your build to a newer Go toolchain release. Since the command may fix hundreds of files, start from a clean git state so that the change consists only of edits from go fix; your code reviewers will thank you.

To preview the changes the above command would have made, use the -diff flag:

You can list the available fixers by running this command:

Adding the name of a particular analyzer shows its complete documentation:

By default, the go fix command runs all analyzers. When fixing a large project it may reduce the burden of code review if you apply fixes from the most prolific analyzers as separate code changes. To enable only specific analyzers, use the flags matching their names. For example, to run just the any fixer, specify the -any flag. Conversely, to run all the analyzers except selected ones, negate the flags, for instance -any=false.

As with go build and go vet, each run of the go fix command analyzes only a specific build configuration. If your project makes heavy use of files tagged for different CPUs or platforms, you may wish to run the command more than once with different values of GOARCH and GOOS for better coverage:

Running the command more than once also provides opportunities for synergistic fixes, as we’ll see below.

The introduction of generics in Go 1.18 marked the end of an era of very few changes to the language spec and the start of a period of more rapid—though still careful—change, especially in the libraries. Many of the trivial loops that Go programm

Source: HackerNews