Confusion with pointer, slices and interface{} in function arguments in go

user_27305 0
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I've been reading about how Go passes arguments to functions via pointer vs. value. I've been reading about the interface type. And I've been tampering with the reflect package. But clearly, I still don't understand how it all works because of this example code here:

package main

import (
  "reflect"
  "fmt"
)
type Business struct {
  Name string
}

func DoSomething(b []Business) {

  var i interface{}
  i = &b
  v := reflect.ValueOf(i).Elem()

  for c:=0 ;c<10; c++ {

    z := reflect.New(v.Type().Elem())
    s := reflect.ValueOf(z.Interface()).Elem()
    s.Field(0).SetString("Pizza Store "+ fmt.Sprintf("%v",c))
    v.Set(reflect.Append(v, z.Elem()))
  }
  fmt.Println(b)

}

func main() {

  business := []Business{}
  DoSomething(business)

}

When I run this code, it will print a list of ten Business structs with the Business.Name of Pizza 0 to 9. I understand that in my example, that my DoSomething function received a copy of the slice of business, and hence, the business variable in my main function remains unaffected by whatever DoSomething does.

What I did next was change my func DoSomething(b []Business) to func DoSomething(b interface{}). Now when I try to run my script, I get the run time error of panic: reflect: Elem of invalid type on on the line z := reflect.New(v.Type().Elem())

I noticed that with DoSomething(b []Business), the variable i == &[]. But with DoSomething(b interface{}), the variable i == 0xc42000e1d0. Why is the variable i different under these two circumstances?

go-interface go slice pointers
1 Answers

Your debugger most likely uses (or at least follows) the default formatting rules of the fmt package:

For compound objects, the elements are printed using these rules, recursively, laid out like this:

struct:             {field0 field1 ...}
array, slice:       [elem0 elem1 ...]
maps:               map[key1:value1 key2:value2 ...]
pointer to above:   &{}, &[], &map[]

In your first case i holds a value of type *[]Business. So if a value being printed (or inspected) is a pointer to slice, it is printed as &[values].

In your second case i holds a pointer to an interface{} value, which is of type *interface{}. When printing a value of this type, the default %p format is used which simply prints the memory address as a hexadecimal value prefixed with 0x.

user_17055980
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