golang-safety

Prevent nil panics in Go by applying defensive patterns that guard against nil interfaces, nil receivers, and uninitialized maps or slices. This skill provides safe initialization practices and structural checks to avoid runtime crashes in pointer-heavy code.

The typed-nil interface trap in Go occurs when an interface holding a nil concrete pointer evaluates as non-nil. You avoid this subtle runtime bug by applying defensive patterns that enforce explicit nil checks before interface assignment.

Safely handle Go map and slice initialization by enforcing defensive copying and strict initialization safety patterns. This prevents silent data corruption by ensuring you never write to unallocated memory or share underlying arrays unexpectedly.

Using defer inside a Go loop causes resource lifecycle bugs because deferred calls stack up until the function returns rather than the loop iteration. You fix this by applying correct defer usage patterns, like extracting the loop body into a separate function.

Yes, you can use linters to detect and prevent common Go safety pitfalls. This skill provides lint-guidance to enforce defensive copying, safe initialization, and nil safety patterns across both standard library usage and application code.