How to disable Golang unused import error

Question

By default, Go treats unused import as error, forcing you to delete the import. I want to know if there exists some hope to change to this behavior, e.g. reducing it to warn

Answer 1

A lot of people have already commented with valid justification and I also acknowledge the original author's intention. However, Rob Pike mentioned in different forums that Go is the outcome of simplification of the processes that a few other mainstream programming languages either lack or not easy to achieve. It's Go's language semantics as well as to make the compilation faster, there are a lot of things that are adopted which initially seems inefficient.

To make it short, unused imports are considered as errors in Go as it blots the program and slows down the compilation. Using import for side effect (_) is a workaround, however, I find this confusing at times when there is a mix of valid imports with side effects along with side effects imported purely for the purpose of debugging/testing especially when the code base is large and there is a chance to forget and not delete unintentionally which may confuse other engineers/reviewers later. I used to comment out the unused ones, however, popular IDEs such as VS code and Goland can use goimports easily which does the insertion and deletion of the imports pretty well. Please refer to the link for more info, https://golang.org/doc/effective_go.html#blank_import