Question

I would have expected this code to work:

package main

type Item struct {
  Key string
  Value string
}

type Blah struct {
  Values []Item
}

func main() {
  var list = [...]Item {
    Item {
      Key : "Hello1",
      Value : "World1",
    },
    Item {
      Key : "Hello1",
      Value : "World1",
    },
  }

  _ = Blah {
    Values : &list,
  }
}

I thought this would be the correct way of doing this; Values is a slice, list is an array. &list should be a slice, which is assignable to Item[], right?

…but instead, it errors with the message:

cannot use &list (type *[2]Item) as type []Item in assignment

In C, you’d write:

struct Item {
  char *key;
  char *value;
};

struct Blah {
   struct Item *values;
};

How do you do that in Go?

I saw this question:
Using a pointer to array

…but either the answers are for a previous version of Go, or they’re just plain wrong. :/

Answer 1

A slice is not simply a pointer to an array, it has an internal representation which contains its length and capacity.

If you want to get a slice from list you can do:

_ = Blah {
    Values : list[:],
}