Use bytes.Equal Instead Of bytes.Compare

ID

go.bytes_compare_equal

Severity

low

Remediation Complexity

trivial

Remediation Risk

low

Remediation Effort

low

Resource

Efficiency

Language

Go

Tags

code-style

Description

Reports bytes.Compare(a, b) == 0 and bytes.Compare(a, b) != 0. When only equality matters, bytes.Equal(a, b) says so directly.

Rationale

bytes.Compare performs a full three-way ordering comparison (-1/0/1). Using it just to ask whether two slices are equal does more work than needed and reads less clearly than bytes.Equal, which is also optimised for the equality case. Relational comparisons against 0 (< 0, > 0) are genuine ordering tests and are not reported.

// Bad
if bytes.Compare(a, b) == 0 {
    handle()
}

// Good
if bytes.Equal(a, b) {
    handle()
}

Remediation

Replace bytes.Compare(a, b) == 0 with bytes.Equal(a, b), and bytes.Compare(a, b) != 0 with !bytes.Equal(a, b).

References