makezero is a Go static analysis tool to find slice declarations that are not initialized with zero length and are later used with append.
go get -u github.com/ashanbrown/makezero
Similar to other Go static analysis tools (such as golint, go vet), makezero can be invoked with one or more filenames, directories, or packages named by its import path. makezero also supports the ... wildcard.
makezero [-always] packages...
- -set_exit_status (default false) - Set exit status to 1 if any issues are found.
- -always (default false) - Always require slices to be initialized with zero length, regardless of whether they are used with append.
To prevent bugs caused by initializing a slice with non-constant length and later appending to it. The recommended prealloc linter wisely encourages the developer to pre-allocate, but when we preallocate a slice with empty values in it and later append to it, we can easily introduce extra empty element in that slice.
Consider the case below:
func copyNumbers(nums []int) []int {
values := make([]int, len(nums)) // satisfy prealloc
for _, n := range nums {
values = append(values, n)
}
return values
}In this case, you probably mean to preallocate with length 0 values := make([]int, 0, len(nums)).
The -always directive enforces that slice created with make always have initial length of zero. This may sound
draconian but it encourages the use of append when building up arrays rather than C-style code featuring the index
variable i such as in:
func copyNumbers(nums []int) []int {
values := make([]int, len(nums))
for i, n := range nums {
values[i] = n
}
return values
}You can ignore a particular issue by including the directive // nozero on that line
Consider whether this should be part of prealloc itself.
Pull requests welcome!