On Monday, 12 April 2021 at 17:01:38 UTC+1 theluk...@gmail.com wrote:

> I've heard several times from members of the community (on Matrix and 
> possibly on answers) that a simple iteration like 
>
> const mixed = "\b5Ὂg̀9! ℃ᾭG"
> for _, c := range mixed {
>       ... do something with c (but not write to it)
>
> will actually silently allocate a slice of runes and decode the string 
> into it, before iteration. I've heard it is done to prevent problems that 
> occur when a programmer might overwrite data being iterated, which should 
> be a no-brainer for programmers in general, but sure, whatever. So is it 
> true in the case for constants? Is it true always, or only when writes 
> occur to the source string or `c` in that case?
>

Writing to c won't make any difference (because it's a completely separate 
variable, an int32 which doesn't share any memory with the original 
string); and writing to the source string is impossible (because strings 
are immutable in go).

Could it be possible that you're thinking of the opposite case?  Given an 
input slice b []byte, if you choose to iterate over it as a series of UTF-8 
codepoints using

    for _, c := range string(b) {
        ...
    }

then I would expect the string(b) conversion to make a byte-for-byte copy 
of b, because a string is immutable but b isn't.
https://play.golang.org/p/3TN2TwdEhk7

This isn't the same as exploding the string into a slice of int32 runes 
up-front, but it might explain where the rumour came from.

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