I do agree, I feel like they’ve used this hack to sneak changes into the language which technically don’t break their Go 1 guarantee. I hope they tidy that up in Go 2 and add proper macro commands with a syntax the compiler checks.

Otherwise these magic comments will grow into their own unaudited meta language with no formal spec, just a few usage examples.

This and struct tags (another stringy metalanguage) are the bits I’m not keen on in Go.