True, it's much more than simple search and replace, since it produces an AST, which provides more powerful refactoring. It's also not very spectacular, since

True, it's much more than simple search and replace, since it produces an AST, which provides more powerful refactoring. It's also not very spectacular, since it's what Java IDEs have done for ages, plus incremental compiling :). (Or code analysis tools such as Sonatype.) Go is just playing catch-up here. The one thing they did very well is dictating the code style with gofmt. You may not like it, but at least there is once standard. Though, one wonders how many developers and businesses use whatever layout Eclipse or Netbeans use out of the box ;).