GO Reference Types.md

title	notetype	date
GO Reference Types	feed	20-02-2022

When you pass an argument to a function in [[01 Inbox/Golang]], the function will behave differently depending on the type of the argument passed. Here we make a diffrerence between [[GO Value Types]] an Reference Types.

With Reference Types, go passes the reference to the value that you pass, allowing the called function to modify the original value of the argument.

package main

import "fmt"

func main() {
	slice := []string{"Hello", "World"}

	modify(slice)

	fmt.Println(slice) // Hello Mom
}

func modify(s []string) {
	s[1] = "Mom"
}

While go is a pass-by-value language and copies anything you pass into a function, these types hold references (pointers) to other types within them, which allows you to modify the underlying types.

E.g. in the example above, go is copying the value of the slice, which holds a pointer to an underlying array, but it doesn't copy the array itself. Therefore, modifying the copied slice still affects the original slice, as both point to the same array.

Types that behave like this are:

• slices
• maps
• channels
• pointers
• functions

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Status: #💡