Using the nilness checker for static analysis

I'd like to use the nilness checker to catch nil pointer dereferences. I installed the checker and built the nilness command:

$ ls src/golang.org/x/tools/go/analysis/passes/nilness/
cmd  nilness.go  nilness_test.go  testdata
$ ls bin/nilness
bin/nilness
$ ls -l bin/nilness
-rwxrwxr-x. 1 ... ... 10291396 Jun 20 22:00 bin/nilness

But running nilness on a directory or file with known errors produces no output.

As an alternative approach, following the standard guidelines, I created this program:

package main

import (
    "golang.org/x/tools/go/analysis/multichecker"
    "golang.org/x/tools/go/analysis/passes/loopclosure"
    "golang.org/x/tools/go/analysis/passes/nilness"
)

func main() {
    multichecker.Main(
        nilness.Analyzer,
        loopclosure.Analyzer,
    )
}

This does not catch nil pointer dereferences either.

Has anybody used this checker? What am I missing?

I think it should work fine. Please double-check the test data on which you are running the nilness analyzer.

Let me show you a sample example:

example/main.go

package nilness

func nilness() {
	var t *int
	if t == nil {
		println(*t) // raise
	}
}

nilness analyzer (main.go)

package main

import (
	"golang.org/x/tools/go/analysis/passes/nilness"
	"golang.org/x/tools/go/analysis/singlechecker"
)

func main() {
	singlechecker.Main(nilness.Analyzer)
}

Run:

$ go build -o checker
$ ./checker ./...

Output:

<path>/example/main.go:5:7: tautological condition: nil == nil
<path>/example/main.go:6:11: nil dereference in load

As @Volker already pointed out that the nilness analyzer only detects the statically provable nil pointer references in your program, so there are usually very less. Maybe this is the reason it is not working for you.