Locks mistakenly passed by value

Reports locks that are mistakenly passed by values.

Accidentally copying a value containing a lock may cause both copies to work incorrectly. Generally, such values should be referred to through a pointer. A lock here means a type implementing sync.Locker, such as sync.Mutex or sync.WaitGroup.

Example:

type SafeInt struct {
  m sync.Mutex
  i int
}

func (s SafeInt) Inc() { // mutex is copied
  s.m.Lock()
  s.i++
  s.m.Unlock()
}

After the Add pointer quick-fix is applied:

type SafeInt struct {
  m sync.Mutex
  i int
}

func (s *SafeInt) Inc() {
  s.m.Lock()
  s.i++
  s.m.Unlock()
}

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.

GoVetCopyLock

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 | Probable bugs

Inspection ID: GoVetCopyLock

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 GoVetCopyLock

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