The Go Programming Language

6.2 Methods with a Pointer Receiver

Because calling a function makes a copy of each argument value, if a function needs to update a variable, or if an argument is so large that we wish to avoid copying it, we must pass the address of the variable using a pointer. The same goes for methods that need to update the receiver variable: we attach them to the pointer type, such as *Point.

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func (p *Point) ScaleBy(factor float64) {
    p.X *= factor
    p.Y *= factor
}

The name of this method is (*Point).ScaleBy. The parentheses are necessary; without them, the expression would be parsed as *(Point.ScaleBy).

In a realistic program, convention dictates that if any method of Point has a pointer receiver, then all methods of ...