You can use the _ signifier to mark imports as optional during development: use import _ "net" Make sure you don't check such lines of code in to your rep

You can use the _ signifier to mark imports as optional during development: use import _ "net" Make sure you don't check such lines of code in to your repo, because there is a concrete benefit to having the language enforce this import strictness. But the person who would check in code with unused _ imports, would probably abuse a hypothetical "allow unused imports" flag in production. Go is probably not for that person.