Until Go 1.18 a one-off function was the standard way; for example, the stdlib’s sort.go does it near the top of the file:
func min(a, b int) int {
if a < b {
return a
}
return b
}
You might still want or need to use this approach so your code works on Go versions below 1.18!
Starting with Go 1.18, you can write a generic min
function which is just as efficient at run time as the hand-coded single-type version, but works with any type with <
and >
operators:
func min[T constraints.Ordered](a, b T) T {
if a < b {
return a
}
return b
}
func main() {
fmt.Println(min(1, 2))
fmt.Println(min(1.5, 2.5))
fmt.Println(min("Hello", "世界"))
}
There’s been discussion of updating the stdlib to add generic versions of existing functions, but if that happens it won’t be until a later version.
math.Min(2, 3)
happened to work because numeric constants in Go are untyped. Beware of treating float64s as a universal number type in general, though, since integers above 2^53
will get rounded if converted to float64.