The Go Programming Language

13. Low-Level Programming

The design of Go guarantees a number of safety properties that limit the ways in which a Go program can “go wrong.” During compilation, type checking detects most attempts to apply an operation to a value that is inappropriate for its type, for instance, subtracting one string from another. Strict rules for type conversions prevent direct access to the internals of built-in types like strings, maps, slices, and channels.

For errors that cannot be detected statically, such as out-of-bounds array accesses or nil pointer dereferences, dynamic checks ensure that the program immediately terminates with an informative error whenever a forbidden operation occurs. Automatic memory management (garbage collection) eliminates ...