Mastering Go - Second Edition

Using the new keyword

Go supports the new keyword, which allows you to allocate new objects. However, there is a very important detail that you need to remember about new: new returns the memory address of the allocated object. Put simply, new returns a pointer.

So, you can create a fresh aStructure variable as follows:

pS := new(aStructure) 

After executing the new statement, you are ready to work with your fresh variable that has its allocated memory zeroed but not initialized.

The main difference between new and make is that variables created with make are properly initialized without just zeroing the allocated memory space. Additionally, make can only be applied to maps, channels, and slices, and does not return a memory address, which ...