My Mistake on Converting Slice to Slice of Ptr in Golang

tech · Apr 22, 2021 · ~1 min

I once made a function to convert a slice to slice of ptr and made a mistake.

My Function

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func Slice2SliceOfPtr(slice []int) []*int {
  n := len(slice)
  r := make([]*int, n, n)

  for i, s := range slice {
    r[i] = &s
  }

  return r
}

It seems normal to me until I realize something was wrong.

My Main Func

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func main() {
  x := []int{1, 2, 3}
  y := Slice2SliceOfPtr(x)

  fmt.Println(x)

  for _, yy := range y {
    fmt.Printf("%d ", *yy)
  }
}

Result

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$ go run main.go 
[1 2 3]
3 3 3

Why only the last element copied to the result?

Because the &s I used is mutated every iteration.

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for i, s := range slice {
  r[i] = &s
}

s never created as a new variable on every iteration, but its value is mutated inside the for loop

So I changed the iteration like this:

Better One

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for i := range slice {
  r[i] = &slice[i]
}

Thank you for reading!

· · ·

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