Receivers and Methods as Pointers and Values

Pointer or value as a receiver

The recv is most often a pointer to the receiver-type for performance reasons (because we don’t make a copy of the value, as would be the case with call by value); this is especially true when the receiver type is a struct. Define the method on a pointer type if you need the method to modify the data the receiver points to. Otherwise, it is often cleaner to define the method on a normal value type.

This is illustrated in the following example :