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Comment by kasey_junk | Hacker News Reader

gofmt is the single biggest feature of Go that might make me try it out. Such a great idea, I wish every language would adopt it.

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If you use C# in Visual Studio, you can press Ctrl+K, Ctrl+D to have the entire document reformatted. Surprisingly few people seem to know about this, judging by how often I've found myself using this on other people's source files and had everything shift around. (Or maybe I'm just unusual and everybody else has just played with the settings.)

The reformatting is actually quite aggressive (it will add/remove blanks and move braces and bits of code around), and so does a good job of keeping everybody's code looking consistent. The Visual Studio text editing functionality only occasionally reaches even the lofty heights of "pretty good", but I do think the document reformatting actually even exceeds that.

(Shame the settings are are per-user rather than per-project, but there you go. It wouldn't be Visual Studio if they didn't manage to fuck something up at the last moment.)

Every decent IDEs have a code formater, but not everyone uses the same IDE so its usefulness is limited. On the other hand, gofmt comes with the platform and make it easy to enforce a common standard between developers.

That said, I think that in C#'s specific case most developers should be using Visual Studio.

The default Visual Studio formatting sucks - wasted lines for opening braces when we have limited vertical real estate. Visual Studio should support per-project, or per-solution formatting configurations, which can be placed into the source code repository to ensure everyone on the team is using the same settings - MonoDevelop already does this and it's really useful for switching between projects which use different formats.

A lot have:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7600130

This isn't the same. Go defines a standard format for all code written in Go with nothing left up to programmer opinion. While a lot of great formatting tools exist for other languages, they require choices to be made which inevitably results in disagreement.

Four space tabs are like a splinter in my mind.

That suggests you don't understand what tabs are. Tabs are a single char, not x number of spaces. You can set your text editor to display tabs as any number of spaces you want, I set mine to two.

See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sln-gJaURzk#t=1735

No need to be pedantic. The choice is more that just trivial display in and IDE.

For example,

https://github.com/zenazn/goji/blob/master/goji.go

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