Assignment to a receiver

Reports assignments to method receivers.

When you assign a value to the method receiver, the value will not be reflected outside of the method itself. Values will be reflected in subsequent calls from the same method.

Example:

package main

import "fmt"

type demo struct {
 Val int
}

func (d *demo) change() {
 d = nil // Assignment to the method receiver propagates only to callees but not to callers
 d.myVal()
}

func (d *demo) myVal() {
 fmt.Printf("my val: %#v\n", d)
}

func (d demo) change2() {
 d = demo{} // Assignment to the method receiver doesn't propagate to other calls
 d.myVal()
}

func (d *demo) change3() {
 d.Val = 3
 d.myVal()
}

func main() {
 d := &demo{}
 d.myVal()
 d.change()
 d.myVal()
 d.Val = 2
 d.change2()
 d.myVal()
 d.change3()
 d.myVal()
}

Locating this inspection

By ID

Can be used to locate inspection in e.g. Qodana configuration files, where you can quickly enable or disable it, or adjust its settings.

GoAssignmentToReceiver

Via Settings dialog

Path to the inspection settings via IntelliJ Platform IDE Settings dialog, when you need to adjust inspection settings directly from your IDE.

Settings or Preferences | Editor | Inspections | Go | Control flow issues

Inspection ID: GoAssignmentToReceiver

Suppressing Inspection

You can suppress this inspection by placing the following comment marker before the code fragment where you no longer want messages from this inspection to appear:

//noinspection GoAssignmentToReceiver

More detailed instructions as well as other ways and options that you have can be found in the product documentation:

GoLand 2025.2

Inspection Details
By default bundled with:	GoLand 2025.2, Qodana for Go 2025.2,
Can be installed with plugin:	Go, 252.26654.0

Last modified: 18 September 2025