What are linters and what role do they play in development?

Linters are tools for static code analysis that automatically check source code for errors, style inconsistencies, potential bugs, and violations of best practices. They help maintain code quality, ensure style uniformity, and prevent common mistakes early in the development process, even before running the program.

For example, in Go, the popular linter golangci-lint combines multiple checks such as govet, golint, staticcheck, and others, allowing developers to quickly identify and fix issues.

Example of using a linter in Go:

golangci-lint run ./...

This runs checks on all files in the project and outputs any issues found.