Currently, go test runs a go vet before its execution. Traditionally, unused symbols in Go are considered compilation errors. This proposal aims to equate tests with empty bodies to unused symbols, and thus, they must be removed.

Right now, a test suite that looks like this:

// ...
func TestTarget(t *testing.T) {}
// ...

will return success:

=== RUN   TestTarget
--- PASS: TestTarget (0.00s)
PASS

With this proposal, instead of getting a test success, it would return a go vet error.

I cannot think of one legitimate use case for an empty test. It seems to be a human error always.

As source code analysis is necessary, it seems that cmd/vet is the more appropriate home for this change rather than cmd/build. Also, there is zero false positives in this case, as the AST that needs to be asserted is very small.

Ideally, it would target functions using *testing.T, *testing.B, *testing.F, testing.TB.