Why should I use the & sign on structs?

Question

In the gotour, there is a section: struct literals.

package main

import \"fmt\"

type Vertex struct {
    X, Y int
}

var (
   v1 = Vertex{1, 2}  // has type Ve         


        

Answer 1

The comments pretty much spell it out:

   v1 = Vertex{1, 2}  // has type Vertex
   p  = &Vertex{1, 2} // has type *Vertex

As in many other languages, & takes the address of the identifier following it. This is useful when you want a pointer rather than a value.

If you need to understand more about pointers in programming, you could start with this for go, or even the wikipedia page.