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Array types

February 28, 2023

Arrays should not be a foreign concept to anyone who’s done programming before. But Go’s version of arrays has some peculiarities that often trip up beginners.

Array types

An array is a numbered sequence of elements of a single type, called the element type. The number of elements is called the length of the array and is never negative.

ArrayType   = "[" ArrayLength "]" ElementType .
ArrayLength = Expression .
ElementType = Type .

The length is part of the array’s type; it must evaluate to a non-negative constant representable by a value of type int. The length of array a can be discovered using the built-in function len. The elements can be addressed by integer indices 0 through len(a)-1. …

[32]byte
[2*N] struct { x, y int32 }
[1000]*float64

The most important, and often surprising, part of all of this is the sentence The length is part of the array’s type. In Go, arrays have a fixed length. They never grow or shrink. You cannot push onto, or pop off of an array. You can only change the existing elements of the array.

This does mean that the length of an array is a constant, and can thus be assigned to a const:

	var x [3]int
	const y = len(x)
	fmt.Println(x, y) // [0 0 0] 3

This limitation means that the array type is often not (directly) used in Go. Instead, the more flexible slice type, which we’ll be talking about shortly, is much more common.

Quotes from The Go Programming Language Specification, Version of January 19, 2023

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