gosmopolitan checks your Go codebase for code smells that may prove to be
hindrance to internationalization ("i18n") and/or localization ("l10n").
The name is a wordplay on "cosmopolitan".
Currently gosmopolitan checks for the following anti-patterns:
-
Occurrences of string literals containing characters from certain writing systems.
Existence of such strings often means the relevant logic is hard to internationalize, or at least, require special care when doing i18n/l10n.
-
Usages of
time.Local.An internationalized app or library should almost never process time and date values in the timezone in which it is running; instead one should use the respective user preference, or the timezone as dictated by the domain logic.
Note that local times are produced in a lot more ways than via direct casts to
time.Local alone, such as:
time.LoadLocation("Local")- received from a
time.Ticker - functions explicitly documented to return local times
time.Now()time.Unix()time.UnixMilli()time.UnixMicro()
Proper identification of these use cases require a fairly complete dataflow analysis pass, which is not implemented currently. In addition, right now you have to pay close attention to externally-provided time values (such as from your framework like Gin or gRPC) as they are not properly tracked either.
Note that the checks implemented here are only suitable for codebases with the following characteristics, and may not suit your particular project's needs:
- Originally developed for an audience using non-Latin writing system(s),
- Returns bare strings intended for humans containing such non-Latin characters, and
- May occasionally (or frequently) refer to the system timezone, but is architecturally forbidden/discouraged to just treat the system timezone as the reference timezone.
For example, the lints may prove valuable if you're revamping a web service originally targetting the Chinese market (hence producing strings with Chinese characters all over the place) to be more i18n-aware. Conversely, if you want to identify some of the i18n-naïve places in an English-only app, the linter will output nothing.
gosmopolitan support has been merged into golangci-lint,
and will be usable out-of-the-box in golangci-lint v1.53.0 or later.
Due to the opinionated coding style this linter advocates and checks for, if
you have enable-all: true in your golangci.yml and your project deals a
lot with Chinese text and/or time.Local, then you'll get flooded with lints
when you upgrade to golangci-lint v1.53.0. Just disable this linter (and
better yet, move away from enable-all: true) if the style does not suit your
specific use case.
gosmopolitan is licensed under the GPL license, version 3 or later.