Using Pointers in a for loop

Question

I\'m struggling to understand why I have a bug in my code in one state but not the other. It\'s been a while since I\'ve covered pointers, so I\'m probably rusty!

Ba

Answer 1

This is because there is only a single loop variable chart, and in each iteration just a new value is assigned to it. So if you attempt to take the address of the loop variable, it will be the same in each iteration, so you will store the same pointer, and the pointed object (the loop variable) is overwritten in each iteration (and after the loop it will hold the value assigned in the last iteration).

This is mentioned in Spec: For statements: For statements with range clause:

The iteration variables may be declared by the "range" clause using a form of short variable declaration (:=). In this case their types are set to the types of the respective iteration values and their scope is the block of the "for" statement; they are re-used in each iteration. If the iteration variables are declared outside the "for" statement, after execution their values will be those of the last iteration.

Your second version works, because you pass the loop variable to a function, so a copy will be made of it, and then you store the address of the copy (which is detached from the loop variable).

You can achieve the same effect without a function though: just create a local copy and use the address of that:

for _, chart := range arr {
    chart2 := chart
    err := svc.repo.Store(&chart2) // Address of the local var
    // ... error handling
}

Also note that you may also store the address of the slice elements:

for i := range arr {
    err := svc.repo.Store(&arr[i]) // Address of the slice element
    // ... error handling
}

The disadvantage of this is that since you store pointers to the slice elements, the whole backing array of the slice would have to be kept in memory for as long as you keep any of the pointers (the array cannot be garbage collected). Moreover, the pointers you store would share the same Chart values as the slice, so if someone would modify a chart value of the passed slice, that would effect the charts whose pointers you stored.

See related questions:

Golang: Register multiple routes using range for loop slices/map

Why do these two for loop variations give me different behavior?

Answer 2

I faced a similar issue today and creating this simple example helped me understand the problem.

// Input array of string values
inputList := []string {"1", "2", "3"}
// instantiate empty list
outputList := make([]*string, 0)

for _, value := range inputList {
    // print memory address on each iteration
    fmt.Printf("address of %v: %v\n", value, &value)
    outputList = append(outputList, &value)
}

// show memory address of all variables
fmt.Printf("%v", outputList)

This printed out:

address of 1: 0xc00008e1e0
address of 2: 0xc00008e1e0
address of 3: 0xc00008e1e0
[0xc00008e1e0 0xc00008e1e0 0xc00008e1e0]

As you can see, the address of value in each iteration was always the same even though the actual value was different ("1", "2", and "3"). This is because value was getting reassigned.

In the end, every value in the outputList was pointing to the same address which is now storing the value "3".