golang 之 slice

Posted 2020-08-07 RushoutAsia

Slice types

A slice is a descriptor for a contiguous segment of an underlying array and provides access to a numbered sequence of elements from that array. A slice type denotes the set of all slices of arrays of its element type. The value of an uninitialized slice is nil.

SliceType = "[" "]" ElementType .

Like arrays, slices are indexable and have a length. The length of a slice s can be discovered by the built-in function len; unlike with arrays it may change during execution. The elements can be addressed by integer indices 0 through len(s)-1. The slice index of a given element may be less than the index of the same element in the underlying array.

A slice, once initialized, is always associated with an underlying array that holds its elements. A slice therefore shares storage with its array and with other slices of the same array; by contrast, distinct arrays always represent distinct storage.

The array underlying a slice may extend past the end of the slice. The capacity is a measure of that extent: it is the sum of the length of the slice and the length of the array beyond the slice; a slice of length up to that capacity can be created by slicing a new one from the original slice. The capacity of a slice a can be discovered using the built-in function cap(a).

A new, initialized slice value for a given element type T is made using the built-in function make, which takes a slice type and parameters specifying the length and optionally the capacity. A slice created with make always allocates a new, hidden array to which the returned slice value refers. That is, executing

make([]T, length, capacity)

produces the same slice as allocating an array and slicing it, so these two expressions are equivalent:

make([]int, 50, 100)
new([100]int)[0:50]

Like arrays, slices are always one-dimensional but may be composed to construct higher-dimensional objects. With arrays of arrays, the inner arrays are, by construction, always the same length; however with slices of slices (or arrays of slices), the inner lengths may vary dynamically. Moreover, the inner slices must be initialized individually.