🔗 Nilaway: Practical Nil Panic Detection for Go

Uber has widely adopted Go as a primary programming language for implementing backend services and libraries due to its high performance. The Go monorepo is the largest codebase at Uber, comprising 90 million lines of code (and growing). This makes tooling for writing reliable Go code a critical part of our development infrastructure.

Pointers (variables that hold the memory addresses of other variables instead of their actual values) are an integral part of the Go programming language and facilitate efficient memory management and effective data manipulation. Therefore, programmers use pointers extensively in writing Go programs for various purposes such as in-place data modification, concurrent programming, easy data sharing, optimizing memory usage, and facilitating interfaces and polymorphism. While pointers are powerful and widely used, it is essential to use them carefully and judiciously to avoid common pitfalls like nil pointer dereferences causing nil panics.

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