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?
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.