Inspectopedia
 
2024.3

Nilness analyzer

Warning
Reliability
New
Last modified: 03 December 2024

Reports problems caused by incorrect usage of the nil value.

The IDE analyses data flow to determine if variables could have nil or not nil values. Based on this, the IDE reports potential issues in code. Consider the following list of situations that might lead to unintended consequences:

  • Method calls with the nil receiver might lead to 'nil pointer dereference'.

  • The nil slice indexing might cause panics.

  • Comparisons like v == nil might be meaningless if v is known to be always nil or not nil.

  • Variables with corresponding errors are not checked on not to be nil. An error corresponds to a variable when they are defined or assigned together in statements like v, err := foo().