The gofmt tool

The gofmt tool is used to keep your code neat and consistently styled. When working on a large software project, an important but often overlooked factor is code style. Having a consistent code style throughout your project is important for readability. When you must read someone else’s code, or even your own code months after writing it, having it in a consistent style makes you focus on the logic without much effort. Having to parse differing styles when reading code is just one more thing to worry about and leads to mistakes. To overcome this issue, Go comes with a tool to automatically format your code in a consistent way called gofmt. This means that, across your project, and even across other Go projects that use the gofmt tool, the code will be consistent. So, it will fix the formatting of the code by correcting the spacing and indentation, as well as trying to align the sections of your code.

Exercise 20.03 – using the gofmt tool

In this exercise...