gopls
Ranked 4 of 7 language servers by recommenders
Go language server that gives editors completion, refactoring and stub generation; people value how it catches problems as they type. Critics report high memory use and weak file-move refactoring.
Go language server that gives editors completion, refactoring and stub generation; people value how it catches problems as they type. Critics report high memory use and weak file-move refactoring.
13 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 9
- criticize it
- 4
- approval share
- 69%
Recommended in 6 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: not recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: not recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: not recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: not recommended
- September 2026: not recommended
- October 2026: not recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 9 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, not met.
- 2.3 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 6 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Catches bugs and warnings while editing
“Since we enabled it over a year ago in gopls, our LSP server, we have discovered hundreds of bugs.”
Comment from 5 Mar 2026 in “10% of Firefox crashes are caused by bitflips” “gopls is a great LSP, though, and it warns you about this immediately”
Comment from 27 Jul 2026 in “Go Analysis Framework: modular static analysis by go team” “Gopls typically does this on save as you are editing”
Comment from 30 Dec 2025 in “Go Away Python” Day-to-day refactoring and stub generation
“gopls will even offer to implement stubs for missing methods.”
Comment from 8 May 2026 in “Just Fucking Use Go” “gopls supports most refactoring you'd need to do day to day.”
Comment from 23 Jul 2026 in “Escape IntelliJ: Scala and Kotlin LSPs on Emacs Eglot”
Other language servers people recommend
The four most recommended other language servers, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| rust-analyzer | 19 | 21 | 48% | 8 | — | — |
| clangd | 15 | 6 | 71% | 10 | — | Approved |
| Rust Glancer | 10 | 0 | 100% | 2 | — | — |
| goplsThis page | 9 | 4 | 69% | 6 | — | — |
| markdown-oxide | 6 | 0 | 100% | 3 | — | — |
What people said
13 of the 14 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“golangci-lint and gopls are both broken if you try using generic methods”
“gopls is a great LSP, though, and it warns you about this immediately”
“gopls doesn't even support moving files/packages and updating references properly”
“gopls supports most refactoring you'd need to do day to day.”
“Well its also just idiotic in terms of how some huge number of people write code.”
“gopls will easily consume 3-4x more memory than GoLand with far worse responsiveness on completions”
“gopls will even offer to implement stubs for missing methods.”
“For go, I used this on my lsp settings and it worked great.”
“Since we enabled it over a year ago in gopls, our LSP server, we have discovered hundreds of bugs.”
“the stdlib toolchain does a lot that other ecosystems need third-party plugins for”
“Gopls has symbol search, but claude almost always uses grep to find uses instead.”
“Gopls typically does this on save as you are editing”
“Glad to see that the bowling development team is focusing on deterministic tooling like language server protocol in gopls”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.