On: Go Developer Survey 2022 Q2 Results

[37ef_ced3]

It's used like this

  p := new(int)

since you can't say

  p := &int{}

[bilinguliar → 37ef_ced3]

Indeed, this may be the use case. I am curious how often you may need a pointer to an int.

[marwatk → bilinguliar]

In things like rest APIs you need them quite a bit to distinguish between a value being the zero value and not present at all. Most libraries I've seen have an IntPointer or similar function exposed globally.

[bilinguliar → marwatk]

This is true. In the case of REST, it is your “encoding/json” who will allocate for int pointer. So I do not see why new() is needed.

[37ef_ced3 → bilinguliar]

Are you seriously suggesting that the language should not have notation for allocating zeroed primitive types and receiving the address of the allocation?

  var (
      p1 = new(int)
      p2 = new(*int)
      p3 = new(**int)
      p4 = new(complex64)
      p5 = new(complex128)
  )

I feel like you must be joking. Should we say

  var (
      c complex128
      p = &c
  )

every time?

[bilinguliar → 37ef_ced3]

In five years, I needed to do the latter only once or twice because a library I was using demanded a pointer to a primitive. Forgive my arrogance, but why does one need a pointer to a zero-value primitive in Go? I sincerely believe there is a use case for it, but I never needed this.