There has been some previous discussion about this in some other issues:

• golangci-lint which was installed from Homebrew cannot load a plugin #1182
• Debug why a private linter was not added to the list #1276 (comment)
• Debug why a private linter was not added to the list #1276 (comment)

Since some of those weren't totally relevant to the attached issues and/or closed, I thought it might make sense to start a new discussion about ways that it might be possible to use prebuiltgolangci-lint binaries with plugin support.

As I understand it, there are a few requirements needed to support Go plugins (copy-pasting from#3259 (reply in thread) for reference):

• exact same Go version
• same OS/arch
• same version of shared dependencies
• CGO_ENABLED=1 during build

I believe (although not 100% positive) that for the first three of these, the Go runtime verifies these and refuses to load a plugin if these conditions are not met.

I am also under the impression thatCGO_ENABLED=0 is used when building releases to improve portability for the distributed binaries. Although it's not clear to me exactly how, I can understand that there might be two use cases here:

• more portable + no plugins
• less portable + plugins

With that in mind, does it seem like a reasonable option to publish two versions of the binaries, one with plugin support (CGO_ENABLED=1) and one without? Existing users could continue to use the same binaries they already use without any change, but custom plugin support (within the constraints listed above) would be possible without requiring a build from source.

Barring any functional changes like publishing plugin-compatible binaries, I think there might be two things that would help users understand what's going on with the status quo:

• As mentioned inDebug why a private linter was not added to the list #1276, if possible, detect configuration forcustom linters and print a warning/error if the binary was built withCGO_ENABLED=0 since it will never be able to load those custom linters.
• Update docs inhttps://golangci-lint.run/contributing/new-linters/#how-to-add-a-private-linter-to-golangci-lint to explicitly mention that building from source withCGO_ENABLED=1 is required. Currently the docs don't seem to mention buildinggolangci-lintitself at all, and only mention building the plugin, which is a bit confusing since really both appear to be required for the custom linter to work.