Pointer vs. value receiver

yourbasic.org/golang

Basic guidelines

For a given type, don’t mix value and pointer receivers.
If in doubt, use pointer receivers (they are safe and extendable).

Pointer receivers

You must use pointer receivers

if any method needs to mutate the receiver,
for structs that contain a sync.Mutex or similar synchronizing field (they musn’t be copied).

You probably want to use pointer receivers

for large structs or arrays (it can be more efficient),
in all other cases.

Value receivers

You probably want to use value receivers

for map, func and chan types,
for simple basic types such as int or string,
for small arrays or structs that are value types, with no mutable fields and no pointers.

You may want to use value receivers

for slices with methods that do not reslice or reallocate the slice.

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