Interprocedural potential nil dereference

This inspection detects potential nil dereferences, taking into account all function calls. The analysis is interprocedural and considers calls across the entire project, including between different packages.

Example:

package a

func CreateUser(name string) *User {
  if isValid(name) {
    return &User{Name: name}
  }
  return nil
}

package main

func main() {
	user := CreateUser("NilDereference")
	print(user.Name) // Potential nil dereference
}

In the provided example, user is a pointer to a User struct, but it can be nil because CreateUser may return nil. Attempting to dereference user to access Name without first checking whether user is nil may result in a runtime error.

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.

GoMaybeNil

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 | Data flow analysis

Inspection ID: GoMaybeNil

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 GoMaybeNil

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