6 ms·

I’m curious, what was the rationale for forbidding it?

kbolino 9mo ago
I interpret this as asking "why can't you get the address of a value in a map?" There are two reasons, and we could also ask "why can't you get the address of a key in a map?" The first reason is flexibility in implementation. Maps are fairly opaque, their implementation details are some of the least exposed in the language (see also: channels), and this is done on purpose to discourage users of the language from mucking with the internals and thus making it harder for the developers of the language to change them. Denying access to internal pointers makes it a lot easier to change the implementation of a map. The second reason is that most ways of implementing a map move the value around copiously. Supposing you could get a pointer p := &m[k] for some map m and key k, what would it even point to? Just the value position of a slot in a hash table. If you do delete(m, k) now what does it point to? If you assign m[k2] but hash(k2) == hash(k) and the map handles the collision by picking a new slot for k, now what does it point to? And eventually you may assign so many keys that the old hash table is too small and so a new one somewhere else in memory has to be allocated, leaving the pointer dangling. While the above also apply to pointers-to-keys, there is another reason you can't get one of those: if you mutated the key, you would (with high probability) violate the core invariant of a hash table, namely that the slot for an entry is determined exactly by the hash of its key. The exact consequences of violating this would depend on the specific implementation, but they are mostly quite bad. For comparison, Rust, with its strong control over mutability and lifetimes, can give you safe references to the entries of a HashMap in a way Go cannot.
- hiddendoom45 9mo ago
  I was burnt by the mutability of keys in go maps a few months ago, I'm not sure exactly how go handles it internally but it ended up with the map growing and duplicate keys in the key list when looking at it with a debugger. The footgun was that url.QueryUnescape returned a slice of the original string if nothing needed to be escaped so if the original string was modified, it would modify the key in the map if you put the returned slice directly into the map.
  - ncruces 9mo ago
    Just how are you modifying strings? Cause that's your bug to fix.
    - hiddendoom45 9mo ago
      That was probably done by fiber[1] the code specifically took the param from it in the function passed to the Get(path string, handlers ...Handler) Router function. c is the *fiber.Ctx passed by fiber to the handler. My code took the string from c.Param("name") passed it to url.QueryUnescape then another function which had a mutex around setting the key/value in the map. I got the hint it was slices and something modifying the keys when I found truncated keys in the key list. My guess is fiber used the same string for the param to avoid allocations. The fix for it is just to create a copy of the string with strings.Clone() to ensure it does not get mutated when it is used as a key. I understand it was an issue with my code, it just wasn't something I expected to be the case so it took several hours and using the debugger to find the root cause. Probably didn't help that a lot of the code was generated by Grok-4-Code/Sonic as a vibe coding test when I decided to go back a few months later and try and fix some of the issues I had myself. [1] https://github.com/gofiber/fiber https://github.com/gofiber/fiber
      - ncruces 9mo ago
        Go strings are supposed to be immutable. I see that fiber goes behind your back and produces potentially mutable strings behind your back: https://github.com/gofiber/utils/blob/c338034/convert.go#L18 https://github.com/gofiber/utils/blob/c338034/convert.go#L18 And… I actually don't have an issue with it to be honest. I've done the same myself. But this mutability should never escape. I'd never persist in using a library that would let it escape. But apparently… it's intentional: https://github.com/gofiber/fiber/issues/185 https://github.com/gofiber/fiber/issues/185 Oh well. You get what you ask for. Please don't complain about maps if you're using a broken library.
  - kbolino 9mo ago
    This sounds like a bug, whether it be in your code, the map implementation, or even the debugger. Map keys are not mutable, and neither are strings.

I interpret this as asking "why can't you get the address of a value in a map?" There are two reasons, and we could also ask "why can't you get the address of a key in a map?" The first reason is flexibility in implementation. Maps are fairly opaque, their implementation details are some of the least exposed in the language (see also: channels), and this is done on purpose to discourage users of the language from mucking with the internals and thus making it harder for the developers of the language to change them. Denying access to internal pointers makes it a lot easier to change the implementation of a map. The second reason is that most ways of implementing a map move the value around copiously. Supposing you could get a pointer p := &m[k] for some map m and key k, what would it even point to? Just the value position of a slot in a hash table. If you do delete(m, k) now what does it point to? If you assign m[k2] but hash(k2) == hash(k) and the map handles the collision by picking a new slot for k, now what does it point to? And eventually you may assign so many keys that the old hash table is too small and so a new one somewhere else in memory has to be allocated, leaving the pointer dangling. While the above also apply to pointers-to-keys, there is another reason you can't get one of those: if you mutated the key, you would (with high probability) violate the core invariant of a hash table, namely that the slot for an entry is determined exactly by the hash of its key. The exact consequences of violating this would depend on the specific implementation, but they are mostly quite bad. For comparison, Rust, with its strong control over mutability and lifetimes, can give you safe references to the entries of a HashMap in a way Go cannot.

hiddendoom45 9mo ago
I was burnt by the mutability of keys in go maps a few months ago, I'm not sure exactly how go handles it internally but it ended up with the map growing and duplicate keys in the key list when looking at it with a debugger. The footgun was that url.QueryUnescape returned a slice of the original string if nothing needed to be escaped so if the original string was modified, it would modify the key in the map if you put the returned slice directly into the map.
- ncruces 9mo ago
  Just how are you modifying strings? Cause that's your bug to fix.
  - hiddendoom45 9mo ago
    That was probably done by fiber[1] the code specifically took the param from it in the function passed to the Get(path string, handlers ...Handler) Router function. c is the *fiber.Ctx passed by fiber to the handler. My code took the string from c.Param("name") passed it to url.QueryUnescape then another function which had a mutex around setting the key/value in the map. I got the hint it was slices and something modifying the keys when I found truncated keys in the key list. My guess is fiber used the same string for the param to avoid allocations. The fix for it is just to create a copy of the string with strings.Clone() to ensure it does not get mutated when it is used as a key. I understand it was an issue with my code, it just wasn't something I expected to be the case so it took several hours and using the debugger to find the root cause. Probably didn't help that a lot of the code was generated by Grok-4-Code/Sonic as a vibe coding test when I decided to go back a few months later and try and fix some of the issues I had myself. [1] https://github.com/gofiber/fiber https://github.com/gofiber/fiber
    - ncruces 9mo ago
      Go strings are supposed to be immutable. I see that fiber goes behind your back and produces potentially mutable strings behind your back: https://github.com/gofiber/utils/blob/c338034/convert.go#L18 https://github.com/gofiber/utils/blob/c338034/convert.go#L18 And… I actually don't have an issue with it to be honest. I've done the same myself. But this mutability should never escape. I'd never persist in using a library that would let it escape. But apparently… it's intentional: https://github.com/gofiber/fiber/issues/185 https://github.com/gofiber/fiber/issues/185 Oh well. You get what you ask for. Please don't complain about maps if you're using a broken library.
- kbolino 9mo ago
  This sounds like a bug, whether it be in your code, the map implementation, or even the debugger. Map keys are not mutable, and neither are strings.