A "usable" nil map, i.e. being able to insert into it straight away, I sympathise with. Remember though that you can't append "in place" to a nil slice: it returns a new slice object. https://play.golang.org/p/dL-r74C5m_w
I presume you don't want to write the same for maps as you do for slices: m2 := m.set(42, "hello") // instead of: m[42] = "hello" I suppose in principle it might be possible to pre-initialize all variables and structs which contain a map to a dynamically-allocated instance of that map type. However, I don't think the idea extends to pointers: 1. you are asking for all pointers to be pre-initialized to some dynamically-generated object, which might need to be garbage-collected immediately the pointer is changed to point to something else. That would be very wasteful. 2. there's the problem with self-referential pointers, e.g. A contains *B and B contains *A. 3. you lose the "nil-ness" property of pointers: the ability of pointers to point to nothing at all (such as the tree example I gave). If you could no longer point to nothing, how could you tell the difference between an interior node and a leaf node of a tree? You would have to change all code to use, say, a slice of pointers (of size 0 or 1) instead of a pointer. Finally, what would you do about nil interface variables? You don't even know what *type* the value should have. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "golang-nuts" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to golang-nuts+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/golang-nuts/60d7d0e7-bc28-485d-b238-7460329c6d28%40googlegroups.com.
