I think you've selected the wrong hammer for your task. If you have a
constructor function that takes a set of values which are usually not set
(ie, you just want the default to be chosen for you), consider Rob Pike's
Functional Options
pattern. http://dave.cheney.net/2014/10/17/functional-options-for-friendly-apis
On Friday, 14 October 2016 18:15:16 UTC+2, Satyen Rai wrote:
>
> Greeting Gophers!
>
> After using Go for a couple of medium sized products, I have come to
> realize that a lot of libraries use pointers to emulate optional/maybe
> types.This includes the protobuf auto generated code for Go. Since there is
> no direct way to take the address of a literal, people end up writing
> something like:
>
> value1 := "A nice string!"
> value2 := 64
> library.Function(&value1, &value2)
>
>
> Some libraries provide helper functions that look like:
>
> func String(str string) *string {
> return &str
> }
>
> func Int64(num int64) *int64 {
> return &num
> }
>
>
> While both methods do the job, neither of them is elegant. In the first
> case, the developer is forced to declare throwaway variables, whereas in
> the second case, multiple libraries implement the same functionality. I
> personally ended up implementing a pointers library for use across my
> projects.
>
> Is is possible to provide a standard shortcut for taking the address of a
> literal? Something like:
>
> library.Function(&"A nice string!", &64)
>
> or
>
> library.Function(&string("A nice string!"), &int64(64))
>
> will do the trick. Even a standard library implementation of the helper
> functions would be nice - though not as elegant.
>
> I am aware that some discussions on this topic have taken place in the
> past, but all the threads I have found were 3+ years old. Now that the Go
> ecosystem has matured and we know what kind of libraries are being
> implemented, perhaps it is time to revisit this?
>
> An alternative would be to provide a way to determine whether a variable
> has been initialized for non pointer types, but I guess that is too big a
> change to Go 1.x - even if it is accepted in the first place.
>
> --
> Thanks,
> Satyen Rai
>
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