This change would require changing the language specification as well as multiple build systems, libraries for processing Go code, and existing tooling that expects to find package declarations in Go files. That seems vastly out of proportion for something that can be better solved by adding a // +build ignore directive at the top of the file, or finding a new key combination that doesn't comment out the package declaration.

I agree with Dominik. Even if we agreed this is a good idea, it would take a few painful years for all the tooling and libraries out there to catch up.

This proposal is also not complete, in my opinion. What's an empty Go file? It's really not a file containing zero bytes, as you yourself mention that it can have comments. Would those comments be Go syntax? Would build directives in such files be obeyed, like //go:generate an // +build? If you used https://golang.org/pkg/go/parser/#ParseFile on such a file, would it return a nil file, or a file without a package name and all the comments?

What's an empty Go file?

"A file with no package declaration and no code to compile" then. The compiler can already detect this. My proposal was simply to ignore this case and throw it away rather than complaining and stopping compilation.

Would those comments be Go syntax? Would build directives in such files be obeyed, like //go:generate an // +build?

Of course. If you comment out the whole file, you'll get // //go:generate, so it doesn't get processed. You have all of the same behaviors as always. No change needed.

If you used https://golang.org/pkg/go/parser/#ParseFile on such a file, would it return a nil file, or a file without a package name and all the comments?

Neither. You'd get an AST of a bunch of comments (unless the parser throws them out?).

Given the trivial // +build ignore workaround the @dominikh notes (#37152 (comment)), and the more-or-less equivalent workaround of renaming the file with a different extension, this doesn't seem worth the tooling churn.

Can you give more detail on the motivating use-case? In my experience most packages don't even compile if you comment out an entire non-test source file, and the -run flag is much more precise for selecting which tests to run anyway.

CC @matloob @jayconrod

Timed out in state WaitingForInfo. Closing.

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