Dereferencing nil is not an unsafe memory access in Go, just like a null pointer exception in Java isn&#x27;t unsafe. Both are well-defined operations (sure, they yield errors, but they do so with 100% reliability and complete control), they&#x27;re not undefined behaviour like in C or C++.<p>Unsafe memory accesses refers to things like accessing an array out-of-bounds, or reading from a pointer that has already been freed. (I suspect a data race could actually cause an array to be accessed out of bounds in Go, but I&#x27;m not sure.)