Avoiding “declared but not used” in Golang while testing

Hi everyone,

I come from a mostly JavaScript and .NET background and am currently transitioning to Golang. I’m really liking the language and ecosystem so far but one thing that has irked me a little is that I can’t leave variables as placeholders or even for debugging.

var placeholder1 [][]string
var test1 string

Something as simple as the above results in two compiler errors stating that the variables are declared but not used`.

A bit of Googling showed quite a few people with similar complaints, but there was one solution that seemed to fit my use-case pretty well:

var placeholder1 [][]string
var test1 string

// Use discards
_, _ = placeholder1, test1

By simply using a discard the compilation error can be circumvented. There’s a fairly detailed discussion on Stackoverflow: https://stackoverflow.com/a/62951339/522859