Pointers
Let’s learn about pointers in Go.
Pointers in Go
Go has support for pointers but not for pointer arithmetic, which is the cause of many bugs and errors in programming languages like C. A pointer is the memory address of a variable. We need to dereference a pointer in order to get its value— dereferencing is performed using the * character in front of the pointer variable. Additionally, we can get the memory address of a normal variable using an & in front of it.
Pointers vs. variables: A graphical explanation
The following diagram shows the difference between a pointer to an int and an int variable.
If a pointer variable points to an existing regular variable, then any changes we make to the stored value using the pointer variable will modify the regular variable.
Reasons for using pointers
We might ask, what is the point of using pointers since there is no support for pointer arithmetic? The main benefit we get from pointers is that passing a ...