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Go subtleties

(harrisoncramer.me)
234 points darccio | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.216s | source
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Someone ◴[] No.45670768[source]
FTA: “In Go, empty structs occupy zero bytes. The Go runtime handles all zero-sized allocations, including empty structs, by returning a single, special memory address that takes up no space.

This is why they’re commonly used to signal on channels when you don’t actually have to send any data. Compare this to booleans, which still must occupy some space.”

I would expect the compiler to ensure that all references to true and false reference single addresses, too. So, at best, the difference of the more obscure code is to, maybe, gain 8 bytes. What do I overlook?

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h4ck_th3_pl4n3t ◴[] No.45671852[source]
Go is copy by default.

That means it would work if *bool is possible but it's not.

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1. giancarlostoro ◴[] No.45672159[source]
If they did it without you explicitly making bool a pointer, then it would be syntactic sugar and it would kind of fall away from the spirit of Go which is, if you look at a file everything that's happening is known to you, there's no metaprogramming witchcraft anywhere in sight usually.