To be clear here as educators, it is important to point out that exporting / persisting / sending a pointer is an awkward concept.
The normal meanings of sending data beyond an executing program have no direct use for the pointer’s literal value; “the thing at location 12345 in the memory of a program that ran last year” is not much help. On the other hand, one might imagine pointers being like file names and then recreate both content and references during reading. The export format could persist all the typed, pointed to values in tables, and then for each pointer variable exported send instead advice like “put the address of the 456th element of the table for type C things in this pointer slot.” A persistent format supporting this way of recreating the semantics of pointers is very much like an archive format (Zip) with support for symbolic links. It is not particularly hard to implement, but it is a “heavyweight” approach. My sense is that the common desire in export tools is high speed and byte efficiency so it is natural that Gob and other mechanisms adopt the “pointers don’t make sense for export” argument. Michael On Tue, Mar 26, 2019 at 6:01 AM roger peppe <rogpe...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > On Mon, 25 Mar 2019 at 14:45, Glen Huang <hey....@gmail.com> wrote: > >> Thanks for the reply, Sameer. >> >> Being able to directly send go types is a really big plus for me, I >> wonder if I really want to use gob, are there any recommended rpc choices? >> > > Note that gob has at least one significant limitation when encoding Go > types - it doesn't know about pointers - in general it encodes a pointer by > omitting a field. So if you want to send a slice of a pointer type where > some elements can be nil, you're out of luck: > https://play.golang.org/p/ThVUT_M0hjR > > -- > 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. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. > -- *Michael T. jonesmichael.jo...@gmail.com <michael.jo...@gmail.com>* -- 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. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
