Mastering Go - Second Edition

Functions that return pointers

As illustrated in pointerStruct.go from Chapter 4, The Uses of Composite Types, it is considered good practice to create new structure variables using a separate function and return a pointer to them from that function. So, the scenario of functions returning pointers is very common. Generally speaking, such a function simplifies the structure of a program and allows the developer to concentrate on more important things instead of copying the same Go code all the time. This section will use a much simpler example, as found in the Go code of returnPtr.go.

The first part of returnPtr.go contains the following Go code:

package main 
 
import ( 
    "fmt" 
) 
 
func returnPtr(x int) *int { 
    y := x * x 
    return &y 
} 

Apart from ...