New to Golang and trying to understand a code snippet I ran across. In the blog I was reading, they define a Vertex struct like so:
type Vertex struct {
X int
Y int
}
And then show an example of how to create a new instance of it and modify one of its fields:
v1 := Vertex{1,2}
v1.X = 3
However they they show an example of how to create a pointer to an instance of this struct and modify one of its fields:
v2 := &Vertex{3,4}
v2.X = 3
This has me a little confused. To me, the statement v2 := &Vertex{3,4} translates to: "v2 is a pointer to a new Vertex{3,4} instance". If that's true, then if v2 is a pointer to a Vertex struct, and not a Vertex struct itself, then how can we invoke v2.X on it (it's a pointer!!!)?
Accessing the struct fields using a pointer, you don't need dereferencing explicitly.
That's why v2.X is same as (*v2).X
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