If the comments impact correctness (which inlining doesn't, but I believe there are other directives that do), saying it's "an implementation detail" waves away "it's an implementation detail that everyone needs" aka part of the spec.
The reason it feels like a kludge is that "comments" are normally understood to be non-impactful. Is a source transformation that removes all comments valid? If comments have no impact per the spec, yes. But that's not the case here.
In practice comments in go are defined to be able to carry semantic meaning extensibly. Whether they're safe to ignore depends on what meaning is given to the directives, e.g. conditional compilation directives.
There are directives and packages that affect correctness. E.g. the embed package allows you to initialize a variable using a directive. E.g. //go:embed foo.json followed by var jsonFile string initializes the jsonFile variable with the contents of the foo.json file. A compiler or tooling that doesn't support this results in broken code.
There's nothing unique to Go about this kind of tooling. It exists in C, Java, Rust, Typescript, and probably dozens of other settings as well. It's the standard way of implementing "after-market" opt-in directives.
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> The reason it feels like a kludge is that "comments" are normally understood to be non-impactful. Is a source transformation that removes all comments valid? If comments have no impact per the spec, yes. But that's not the case here.
This is not inlining in the compiler. It's a directive to a source transformation (refactoring) tool. So yes, this has no impact on the code. It will do things if you run `go fix` on your codebase, otherwise it won't.
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