Hint: https://godoc.org/golang.org/x/tools/cmd/gorename

It's coming back in Go 1.9

Thanks for the links, I understand the issue a bit more. I am still not convinced it's the right solution though. Why not a compile time option?

But that doesn't scale at all unless you can push it back out. Aliasing and running this script both imply long term maintenance commitments, but the script is alot more invasive and requires a lot more work because its semantics are defined over the whole language as a transformer rather than as a single feature inside the compiler.

I think people suggesting a transformer script are inviting Go back into the dark pre-vendor days when every dependency got out of date rapidly and builds were "losable".