Learning Golang (some rough notes) - S01E01 - Pointers

Pointers in Go has to do with three main things:

1. Garbage Collection

   Go is a garbage collected language just like Java. However, it uses of some less sophisticated algorithms to reclaim memory space than Java that tries to figure out too much doing heap transverse and thus spending too much CPU on it. Go is meant to provide better performance and because of this it tries to share the responsibility with the developer about how to track references. And if a developer uses a pointer; it is the indication about which references need to be reclaimed given its scope. It uses something called reference counting to figure that out.

2. Encapsulation (Information Hiding)

   Pointers are particularly good for structs, which represents complex data structures. By returning structs rather than the actual value developers can ensure that only the function that created the struct can act upon it.

3. Immutability

   You better than anyone will understand this. Structs represents records and therefore their occurance needs to be immutable. You can’t change what happened in the past and thus; you are not supposed to change structs — unless the function that created the struct provides a write operation. So in Go, we use the concept of interface methods that are nothing more than function pointers to a struct.