Hands-On Software Engineering with Golang

Zero values are your friends

One great feature that Go offers is that each type is automatically assigned its zero value when it gets instantiated. Some interesting examples from Go and its standard library are as follows:

• Go channels; nil channels indefinitely block go-routines attempting to read off them
• The zero value for a Go slice; this is an empty slice that things can be appended to
• The sync.Mutex type, whose zero value indicates that the mutex is unlocked
• The bytes.Buffer type, whose zero value indicates an empty buffer

By relying on zero values when designing new types, we can provide implementations that work out of the box without the need to explicitly invoke a constructor or any other initializer method. The following code ...