This one was voted down but there is a good point here. There is no way to figure out what binaries there are (maybe you could make `go list` show all the `package main`s?, not sure).

Beyond that there's no way to discover what build flags may be needed to give you the binary that the developer intended. Be it tags, ldflags, cgo support.

I agree, especially since 'go build', 'go install', 'go test', 'go generate', 'go vet', 'go fmt', etc will do what you expect when you run them without parameters. I think the difference may be that 'go run' expect one package to run, while the others can take multiple. If you have a library (no top-level main package) that comes with two tools foo and bar, I don't think 'go run' could know which package to run. Example tree:

    go.mod
    go.sum
    library.go     // package library
    cmd/foo/foo.go // package main
    cmd/bar/bar.go // package main

This is what Rust does with `cargo run`; I think Poetry for Python tries to do the same thing but I haven't used it in awhile.

That is how `cargo run` for rust works by default. As long as there is just one executable. If you have multiple executables in a project you do need to specify which one though.

'go run cmd/COMMAND' is what I like best. I normally don’t bother descending further than the root of a project in the shell because all my other interactions are in Emacs rather than a terminal (I rarely use the shell in Emacs because the shell is so much less powerful for most stuff). Maybe that’s weird. I think folks who live in vi spend a lot more time bouncing around directories in the shell.

Or, even better, `./main`

> I don't think it's simple.

I mean, it kinda is. If you're a Go developer that went further than hello world, you will probably be aware of these two possibilities:

If . contains a "main" package then it's "go run .", otherwise the source for the binaries probably reside in "./cmd/X" and you have to run "go run cmd/X".

You can probably find Go projects that don't follow these rules, but I doubt anyone would want to interact with them.

You also have to know whether it's `cd cmd; go run main.go` or just `go run cmd/main.go`. And you have to know to set CGO_ENABLED=0 if you want to run it on Linux instead of MacOS.