I'm trying to merge multiple slices as follows,
package routes
import (
"net/http"
)
type Route struct {
Name string
Method string
Pattern string
Secured bool
HandlerFunc http.HandlerFunc
}
type Routes []Route
var ApplicationRoutes Routes
func init() {
ApplicationRoutes = append(
WifiUserRoutes,
WifiUsageRoutes,
WifiLocationRoutes,
DashboardUserRoutes,
DashoardAppRoutes,
RadiusRoutes,
AuthenticationRoutes...
)
}
However the builtin append() is capable of appending two slices, hence it throws too many arguments to append at compile time. Is there an alternative function to achieve the task? or is there a better way to merge the slices?
append
operates on individual elements, not on entire slices. Append each slice in a loop
routes := []Routes{
WifiUserRoutes,
WifiUsageRoutes,
WifiLocationRoutes,
DashboardUserRoutes,
DashoardAppRoutes,
RadiusRoutes,
AuthenticationRoutes,
}
var ApplicationRoutes []Route
for _, r := range routes {
ApplicationRoutes = append(ApplicationRoutes, r...)
}
This question has been answered already, but I wanted to post this here because the accepted answer is not the most efficient.
The reason is that creating an empty slice and then appending can lead to many unnecessary allocations.
The most efficient way would be to pre-allocate a slice and copy the elements into it. Below is a package which implements the concatenation both ways. If you benchmark you can see that pre-allocating is ~2x faster and allocates much less memory.
Benchmark Results:
go test . -bench=. -benchmem
testing: warning: no tests to run
BenchmarkConcatCopyPreAllocate-8 30000000 47.9 ns/op 64 B/op 1 allocs/op
BenchmarkConcatAppend-8 20000000 107 ns/op 112 B/op 3 allocs/op
Package concat:
package concat
func concatCopyPreAllocate(slices [][]byte) []byte {
var totalLen int
for _, s := range slices {
totalLen += len(s)
}
tmp := make([]byte, totalLen)
var i int
for _, s := range slices {
i += copy(tmp[i:], s)
}
return tmp
}
func concatAppend(slices [][]byte) []byte {
var tmp []byte
for _, s := range slices {
tmp = append(tmp, s...)
}
return tmp
}
Benchmark tests:
package concat
import "testing"
var slices = [][]byte{
[]byte("my first slice"),
[]byte("second slice"),
[]byte("third slice"),
[]byte("fourth slice"),
[]byte("fifth slice"),
}
var B []byte
func BenchmarkConcatCopyPreAllocate(b *testing.B) {
for n := 0; n < b.N; n++ {
B = concatCopyPreAllocate(slices)
}
}
func BenchmarkConcatAppend(b *testing.B) {
for n := 0; n < b.N; n++ {
B = concatAppend(slices)
}
}