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{.epigraph}

Go has pointers but not pointer arithmetic. You cannot use a pointer variable to walk through the bytes of a string.

Quote: Go For C++ Programmers -- Go Authors

In this chapter we delve deeper into the language.

Go has pointers. There is however no pointer arithmetic, so they act more like references than pointers that you may know from C. Pointers are useful. Remember that when you call a function in Go, the variables are pass-by-value. So, for efficiency and the possibility to modify a passed value in functions we have pointers.

You declare a pointer by prefixing the type with an '*': var p *int. Now p is a pointer to an integer value. All newly declared variables are assigned their zero value and pointers are no different. A newly declared pointer, or just a pointer that points to nothing, has a nil-value (!nil). In other languages this is often called a NULL pointer in Go it is just nil. To make a pointer point to something you can use the address-of operator (!operators, address-of) (&), which we demonstrate here:

var p *int
fmt.Printf("%v", p) //<<1>>

var i int	    //<<2>>
p = &i		    //<<3>>

fmt.Printf("%v", p) //<<4>>

This <<1>> Prints nil. Declare <<2>> an integer variable i. Make p point <<3>> to i, i.e. take the address of i. And this <<4>> will print something like 0x7ff96b81c000a. De-referencing a pointer is done by prefixing the pointer variable with *.

As said, there is no pointer arithmetic, so if you write: *p++, it is interpreted as (*p)++: first reference and then increment the value.(!operators, increment)

Allocation

Go also has garbage collection, meaning that you don't have to worry about memory deallocation.^[The downside is that you know have to worry about garbage collection. If you really need it garbage collection in a Go program can be disabled by running it with the environment variable GOGC set to off: GOGC=off ./myprogram.]

To allocate memory Go has two primitives, new and make. They do different things and apply to different types, which can be confusing, but the rules are simple. The following sections show how to handle allocation in Go and hopefully clarifies the somewhat artificial distinction between new (!built-in, new) and make (!built-in,make).

Allocation with new

The built-in function new is essentially the same as its namesakes in other languages: new(T) allocates zeroed storage for a new item of type T and returns its address, a value of type *T. Or in other words, it returns a pointer to a newly allocated zero value of type T. This is important to remember.

The documentation for bytes.Buffer states that "the zero value for Buffer is an empty buffer ready to use.". Similarly, sync.Mutex does not have an explicit constructor or Init method. Instead, the zero value for a sync.Mutex is defined to be an unlocked mutex.

Allocation with make

The built-in function make(T, args) serves a purpose different from new(T). It creates slices, maps, and channels only, and it returns an initialized (not zero!) value of type T, and not a pointer: *T. The reason for the distinction is that these three types are, under the covers, references to data structures that must be initialized before use. A slice, for example, is a three-item descriptor containing a pointer to the data (inside an array), the length, and the capacity; until those items are initialized, the slice is nil. For slices, maps, and channels, make initializes the internal data structure and prepares the value for use.

For instance, make([]int, 10, 100) allocates an array of 100 ints and then creates a slice structure with length 10 and a capacity of 100 pointing at the first 10 elements of the array. In contrast, new([]int) returns a pointer to a newly allocated, zeroed slice structure, that is, a pointer to a nil slice value. These examples illustrate the difference between new and make.

var p *[]int = new([]int)       //<<1>>
var v  []int = make([]int, 100) //<<2>>

var p *[]int = new([]int)       //<<3>>
*p = make([]int, 100, 100)

v := make([]int, 100)           //<<4>>

Allocates <<1>> slice structure; rarely useful. v <<2>> refers to a new array of 100 ints. At <<3>> we make it unnecessarily complex, <<4>> is more idiomatic.

Remember that make applies only to maps, slices and channels and does not return a pointer. To obtain an explicit pointer allocate with new.

A> new allocates; make initializes. A> A> The above two paragraphs can be summarized as: A> A> * new(T) returns *T pointing to a zeroed T A> * make(T) returns an initialized T A> A> And of course make is only used for slices, maps and channels.

Constructors and composite literals

Sometimes the zero value isn't good enough and an initializing constructor is necessary, as in this example taken from the package os.

func NewFile(fd int, name string) *File {
    if fd < 0 {
        return nil
    }
    f := new(File)
    f.fd = fd
    f.name = name
    f.dirinfo = nil
    f.nepipe = 0
    return f
}

There's a lot of boiler plate in there. We can simplify it using a composite literal (!literal, composite), which is an expression that creates a new instance each time it is evaluated.

func NewFile(fd int, name string) *File {
    if fd < 0 {
        return nil
    }
    f := File{fd, name, nil, 0}
    return &f	//<<1>>
}

It is OK to return the address of a local variable <<1>> the storage associated with the variable survives after the function returns.

In fact, taking the address of a composite literal allocates a fresh instance each time it is evaluated, so we can combine these last two lines.^[Taking the address of a composite literal tells the compiler to allocate it on the heap, not the stack.]

return &File{fd, name, nil, 0}

The items (called fields) of a composite literal are laid out in order and must all be present. However, by labeling the elements explicitly as field:value pairs, the initializers can appear in any order, with the missing ones left as their respective zero values. Thus we could say

return &File{fd: fd, name: name}

As a limiting case, if a composite literal contains no fields at all, it creates a zero value for the type. The expressions new(File) and &File{} are equivalent. In fact the use of new is discouraged.

Composite literals can also be created for arrays, slices, and maps, with the field labels being indices or map keys as appropriate. In these examples, the initializations work regardless of the values of Enone, and Einval, as long as they are distinct:

ar := [...]string{Enone: "no error", Einval: "invalid argument"}
sl := []string{Enone: "no error", Einval: "invalid argument"}
ma := map[int]string {Enone: "no error", Einval: "invalid argument"}

Defining your own types

Of course Go allows you to define new types, it does this with the type(!keywords, type) keyword: type foo int

This creates a new type foo which acts like an int. Creating more sophisticated types is done with the struct (!keywords, struct) keyword. An example would be when we want record somebody's name (string) and age (int) in a single structure and make it a new type:

<{{src/beyond/struct.go}}

Apropos, the output of fmt.Printf("%v\n", a) is &{Pete 42}

That is nice! Go knows how to print your structure. If you only want to print one, or a few, fields of the structure you'll need to use .<field name>. For example to only print the name:

fmt.Printf("%s", a.name)

More on structure fields

As said each item in a structure is called a field(!field). A struct with no fields: struct {}. Or one with four fields:

struct {
    x, y int
    A *[]int
    F func()
}

If you omit the name for a field, you create an anonymous field (((field, anonymous))), for instance:

struct {
    T1        // Field name is T1.
    *T2       // Field name is T2.
    P.T3      // Field name is T3.
    x, y int  // Field names are x and y.
}

Note that field names that start with a capital letter are exported, i.e. can be set or read from other packages. Field names that start with a lowercase are private to the current package. The same goes for functions defined in packages, see (#packages) for the details.

Methods

If you create functions that work on your newly defined type, you can take two routes:

  1. Create a function that takes the type as an argument.
func doSomething(n1 *NameAge, n2 int) { /* */ }
  1. Create a function that works on the type (see receiver in (#functions)):
func (n1 *NameAge) doSomething(n2 int) { /* */ }

This is a method call, which can be used as:

var n *NameAge
n.doSomething(2)

Whether to use a function or method is entirely up to the programmer, but if you want to satisfy an interface (see the next chapter) you must use methods. If no such requirement exists it is a matter of taste whether to use functions or methods.

But keep the following in mind, this is quoted from [@go_spec]:

If x is addressable and &x's method set contains m, x.m() is shorthand for (&x).m().

In the above case this means that the following is not an error:

var n NameAge	    // Not a pointer
n.doSomething(2)

Here Go will search the method list for n of type NameAge, come up empty and will then also search the method list for the type *NameAge and will translate this call to (&n).doSomething(2).

There is a subtle but major difference between the following type declarations. Also see the Section "Type Declarations" [@go_spec]. Suppose we have:

// A Mutex is a data type with two methods, Lock and Unlock.
type Mutex struct         { /* Mutex fields */ }
func (m *Mutex) Lock()    { /* Lock impl. */ }
func (m *Mutex) Unlock()  { /* Unlock impl. */ }

We now create two types in two different manners:

  • type NewMutex Mutex.
  • type PrintableMutex struct{Mutex}.

NewMutex is equal to Mutex, but it does not have any of the methods of Mutex. In other words its method set is empty. But PrintableMutex has inherited (!methods, inherited) the method set from Mutex. The Go term for this is embedding (!structures, embed). In the words of [@go_spec]:

The method set of *PrintableMutex contains the methods Lock and Unlock bound to its anonymous field Mutex.

Conversions

Sometimes you want to convert a type to another type. This is possible in Go, but there are some rules. For starters, converting from one value to another is done by operators (that look like functions: byte()) and not all conversions are allowed.

{#tab-conversion} {{tab/conversion.md}}

  • From a string to a slice of bytes or runes.

    mystring := "hello this is string"
byteslice := []byte(mystring)

    Converts to a byte slice, each byte contains the integer value of the corresponding byte in the string. Note that as strings in Go are encoded in UTF-8 some characters in the string may end up in 1, 2, 3 or 4 bytes.

    runeslice  := []rune(mystring)

    Converts to an rune slice, each rune contains a Unicode code point. Every character from the string corresponds to one rune.

  • From a slice of bytes or runes to a string.

    b := []byte{'h','e','l','l','o'} // Composite literal.
s := string(b)
i := []rune{257,1024,65}
r := string(i)

For numeric values the following conversions are defined:

  • Convert to an integer with a specific (bit) length: uint8(int)
  • From floating point to an integer value: int(float32). This discards the fraction part from the floating point value.
  • And the other way around: float32(int).

User defined types and conversions

How can you convert between the types you have defined yourself? We create two types here Foo and Bar, where Bar is an alias for Foo:

type foo struct { int }  // Anonymous struct field.
type bar foo             // bar is an alias for foo.

Then we:

var b bar = bar{1} // Declare `b` to be a `bar`.
var f foo = b	   // Assign `b` to `f`.

Which fails on the last line with: cannot use b (type bar) as type foo in assignment

This can be fixed with a conversion: var f foo = foo(b)

Note that converting structures that are not identical in their fields is more difficult. Also note that converting b to a plain int also fails; an integer is not the same as a structure containing an integer.

Exercises

{{ex/beyond/ex.md}}