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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