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by bankisan 2058 days ago
Right, but they mentioned sending immutable structs which is why I gave the struct example. But you're right that every declared map is a just a pointer.

With respect to your second point, I see what you mean but I still don't think that's a negative of Go. You can pass in copied values without having to have a deep_copy() primitive (loop map values and copy to new map, dereferencing a pointer, etc.). Like other parts of Go, if you want to make your data immutable there is no syntactic sugar. You have to explicitly write it out.

2 comments

> With respect to your second point, I see what you mean but I still don't think that's a negative of Go.

It is a negative of Go, because Go pushes you into the pit of failure by its design: it is much, much harder to do the right thing (send deep copies of objects over channels) than it is to do the wrong things (send pointers or shallow copies over channels).

You'd have to roll your own deep_copy by hand (or code generation) for every single data type.