On Sunday, August 9, 2026 at 1:13:14 PM UTC-3 Tom Limoncelli wrote:
For example, in github.com/DNSControl/dnscontrol every RecordConfig{}
(the struct that stores a DNS record) includes a field Metadata:
map[string]string for storing key/value pairs. Few of the records will
ever store metadata. We don't want to preallocate potentially millions
of empty map structures. However it is annoying to have to check for
nil in the code that does use this feature.
The tension here between "wanting to save alot of space" and "checking if
space has been saved"
seems fundamental. These are two sides of the same coin.
Your best bet is to simply encapsulate access with getter and setter
helper functions that do the nil checks for you, then use the helpers
everywhere.
This is simple and straight forward.
func metaGet(m map[string]string, key string) (val string, ok bool) {
if m == nil {
return
}
val, ok = m[key]
return
}
func metaSet(m map[string]string, key string, val string) {
if m == nil {
m = make(map[string]string)
}
m[key] = val
}
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