IIRC, a nil value can be checked against a literal successfully but not against another nil value. Say you want to check for equality of two vars that could be nil. You just need an extra if statement to ensure that you are not trying to compare nil and nil or nil and a non-nil value (that’ll give you a type error or NPE):

var a *string
var b *string

...
if a != nil && b != nil {
  if a == b {
    fmt.Println("Party!")
  } else {
    fmt.Println("Also Party!")
}