I don't mean it actually adds them to the file itself, its like it adds virtual ones during compilation. Try placing the { from the func main() { on a new line and it will fail to compile

Oh, I see, that's what you meant. Thanks for clarifying :)

The Go compiler inserts semi-colons. https://go.dev/ref/spec#Semicolons

If you follow those rules, you will see that this:

  if true;
  {
      fmt.Println()
  }
  else
  {
      fmt.Println()
  }

Will get rewritten to:

  if true;
  {
      fmt.Println();
  };
  else;
  {
      fmt.Println();
  };

And that won't work. That's why the braces need to be as "} else {". and "if .. {".

It used to be that the compiler gave some pretty confusing errors about semi-colons on this, but it seems that's been improved now.

JavaScript has similar semi-colon insertion by the way, but with some different (more confusing) rules.

That's really neat, it had escaped me till now. Thanks for the explanation (today I'm one of the lucky 10,000!)