What's the point of having pointers in Go?

Question

I know that pointers in Go allow mutation of a function\'s arguments, but wouldn\'t it have been simpler if they adopted just references (with appropriate const or mutable q

Answer 1

Pointers are usefull for several reasons. Pointers allow control over memory layout (affects efficiency of CPU cache). In Go we can define a structure where all the members are in contiguous memory:

type Point struct {
  x, y int
}

type LineSegment struct {
  source, destination Point
}

In this case the Point structures are embedded within the LineSegment struct. But you can't always embed data directly. If you want to support structures such as binary trees or linked list, then you need to support some kind of pointer.

type TreeNode {
  value int
  left  *TreeNode
  right *TreeNode
}

Java, Python etc doesn't have this problem because it does not allow you to embed composite types, so there is no need to syntactically differentiate between embedding and pointing.

Issues with Swift/C# structs solved with Go pointers

A possible alternative to accomplish the same is to differentiate between struct and class as C# and Swift does. But this does have limitations. While you can usually specify that a function takes a struct as an inout parameter to avoid copying the struct, it doesn't allow you to store references (pointers) to structs. This means you can never treat a struct as a reference type when you find that useful e.g. to create a pool allocator (see below).

Custom Memory Allocator

Using pointers you can also create your own pool allocator (this is very simplified with lots of checks removed to just show the principle):

type TreeNode {
  value int
  left  *TreeNode
  right *TreeNode

  nextFreeNode *TreeNode; // For memory allocation
}

var pool [1024]TreeNode
var firstFreeNode *TreeNode = &pool[0] 

func poolAlloc() *TreeNode {
    node := firstFreeNode
    firstFreeNode  = firstFreeNode.nextFreeNode
    return node
}

func freeNode(node *TreeNode) {
    node.nextFreeNode = firstFreeNode
    firstFreeNode = node
}

Swap two values

Pointers also allows you to implement swap. That is swapping the values of two variables:

func swap(a *int, b *int) {
   temp := *a
   *a = *b
   *b = temp
}

Conclusion

Java has never been able to fully replace C++ for systems programming at places such as Google, in part because performance can not be tuned to the same extend due to the lack of ability to control memory layout and usage (cache misses affect performance significantly). Go has aimed to replace C++ in many areas and thus needs to support pointers.