Returning a reference to a slice or retrning a slice of references

<p>Hey, </p> <p>So I have a function which should return a list of &#34;Job&#34; structs. What would be the prefered way to return it? Should it be a []*Job or *[]Job ?</p> <hr/>**评论：**<br/><br/>binaryblade: <pre><p>Creating a pointer to a slice is silly. Just create a slice of however you want to naturally store your objects.</p></pre>reus: <pre><p>If they&#39;re read-only, use []Job, otherwise []*Job. </p></pre>zaib0n: <pre><p>is the type of access should be the only concern ? passing the jobs by value means make a copy of each job, right ? So wouldn&#39;t it be more efficient to pass jobs by reference, so the copy is not needed ? I&#39;m never sure what&#39;s the correct way to choose between the two</p></pre>dshills: <pre><p>That doesn&#39;t sound right. The slice will be copied but it carries a reference to the backing array. The reference will be copied but not the backing array. The jobs in the backing array would not get copied. The receiver would have a copied slice but full access to the original job backing array. Or am I missing something?</p></pre>zaib0n: <pre><p>you are right cause in this case we speak about a slice. But what if it was an array directly ?</p></pre>dshills: <pre><p>An interesting question actually. I think as soon as you try to pass it, it becomes a slice automagically. </p></pre>djherbis: <pre><p>Arrays are copied when they are passed, they don&#39;t get converted to slices. If you want to convert an array to a slice just do: </p> <pre><code>mySlice := myArray[:] </code></pre> <p><a href="http://blog.golang.org/go-slices-usage-and-internals" rel="nofollow">http://blog.golang.org/go-slices-usage-and-internals</a></p></pre>dshills: <pre><p>ahhhh that fills a knowledge hole. Thanks for the link.</p></pre>mihai_stancu: <pre><p>Slices themselves ar small enough to pass around by value and they were designed to be passed around by value. So a pointer to a slice wouldn&#39;t make that much sense.</p> <p>If your Job objects are already in a slice by value ([]Job) then creating and passing a []Job slice would be trivial. While creating and passing a []*Job slice would require a few more lines of code.</p></pre>DavidDavidsonsGhost: <pre><p>Slices are references to arrays. They consist of a pointer to the backing array a capacity and a length. Just pass the slice around by value, unless you want to be able to modify the original slice.</p></pre>