I don’t believe the Go compiler would reject unformatted code. The compiler has its own set of rules for what it views as syntactically correct code, but these rules have nothing to do with gofmt’s formatting rules.

For example, it’s the compiler and not gofmt that dictates that you must write a curly brace only on the same line of an “if” statement. If you put it on the next line, you don’t have unformatted code - you have a syntax error.

However, the compiler doesn’t care if you have too much whitespace between tokens or if you write your slice like []int{1, 2,3,4}, but gofmt does.

We could say the rules of the compiler and gofmt don’t even overlap.