How to preallocate and fill a slice of pointers in a go-idiomatic way?

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For your first example, I would do:

mySlice := make([]*UselessStruct, 5)
for i := range mySlice {
     mySlice[i] = new(UselessStruct)
}

The issue you are facing in both examples is you are appending to a slice that is already the correct length. If you set mySlice := make([]*UselessStruct, 5), you are asking for a slice of nil pointers of length 5. If you append one pointer, it now has length 6.

Instead, you want to use mySlice := make([]*UselessStruct, 0, 5). This creates a slice of length 0 but capacity 5. Each time you append it will add one to the length but it won’t reallocate until you exceed the slice’s capacity.

mySlice := make([]*UselessStruct, 0, 5)
for i := 0; i != 5; i++ {
    mySlice = append(mySlice, &UselessStruct{})
}
// mySlice is [0xc010035160 0xc010035170 0xc010035180 0xc010035190 0xc0100351a0]

Both of my examples will work as you expect but I recommend the first one for purely style reasons.

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