Code inspections

In GoLand, there is a set of code inspections that detect and correct anomalous code in your project before you compile it. The IDE can find and highlight various problems, locate dead code, find probable bugs, spelling problems, and improve the overall code structure.

Inspections can scan your code in all project files, or only in specific scopes (for example, only in production code, or in modified files).

Every inspection has a severity level— the extent to which a problem can affect your code. Severities are highlighted differently in the editor so that you can quickly distinguish between critical problems and less important things. GoLand comes with a set of predefined severity levels and enables you to create your own.

Inspections and their settings are grouped in profiles. Each profile contains the information on the enabled inspections, a scope of files that they analyze, and their severity levels.

Access all available inspections and their settings

In the Settings/Preferences dialog Ctrl+Alt+S, go to Editor | Inspections.
You can also press Ctrl+Alt+Shift+H and select Configure Inspections in the popup that opens.

Use to filter the inspections list. For example, you can filter inspections by severity or by language.

Examples of code inspections

To see the list of available inspections, open settings Ctrl+Alt+S and navigate to Editor | Inspections.

Unreachable code

The Unreachable code inspection detects parts of code that cannot be executed.

Unhandled Error

The Unhandled Error code inspection alerts you about functions or methods that can return an error value that is not handled in the code. In settings, you can change the severity level for each scope and, if necessary, exclude function names or method names for this inspection.

Nilness analyzer

Reports problems caused by incorrect use of the nil value. Analyses data flow to determine if variables have nil or not nil values. For example, with the nilness analyzer you can catch the following situations:

Method calls with nil receiver that could lead to nil pointer dereference.
Indexing of the nil slice that might cause panics.
Comparisons like v == nil that are meaningless if v is always nil or not nil.
Operations with values that are used without proper error handling. For example, in statements like f, err := foo(), GoLand highlights potentially dangerous operations with f when err is not handled.

Redundant type conversions

The Redundant type conversions inspection warns you about redundant type conversions that can be omitted. Consider the following code example.

                    s := string("")
                    _ = s
                

Code converts a string literal to a string. It is a redundant action because the output is a string anyway.

Last modified: 19 May 2021