What is the difference between Go's pointer dereferencing and pointer indirections?
In Go, pointer dereferencing and pointer indirection are two ways to access the value of a variable indirectly through a pointer.
Pointer dereferencing is the act of using the *****
operator to access the value stored in the memory location pointed to by a pointer. For example, given a pointer variable **p**
that points to an **int**
variable **x**
, we can dereference **p**
to obtain the value of **x**
using the *****
operator:
var x int = 42
var p *int = &x
fmt.Println(*p) // prints 42
Here, **p**
is used to dereference the pointer **p**
and obtain the value of **x**
.
Pointer indirection, on the other hand, is the implicit dereferencing that occurs when we use a pointer variable in an expression. For example, consider the same **p** and **x** variables as before:
var x int = 42
var p *int = &x
fmt.Println(p) // prints the memory address of x
fmt.Println(&p) // prints the memory address of p
Here, when we use the **p**
pointer variable in the **fmt.Println**
function, Go implicitly dereferences **p**
to obtain the value of **x**
. Similarly, when we take the address of **p**
using the **&**
operator, Go does not dereference **p**
but instead returns the memory address of the pointer variable itself.
In general, pointer dereferencing is used when we want to explicitly access the value pointed to by a pointer, while pointer indirection is used when we want to pass a pointer value around without having to explicitly dereference it each time.