The problem

If you have ever worked with the Amazon Web Services SDK for Go or Kubernetes Custom Resource Definitions (CRD) in Go, then you are no doubt quite familiar when some argument or field takes a pointer to a string or int, for example (Go playground):

package main
import (
    "fmt"
)
type request struct {
    host *string
    port *int
}
func print(r request) {
    fmt.Print("request: host=")
    if r.host != nil {
        fmt.Print(*r.host)
    }
    fmt.Print(", port=")
    if r.port != nil {
        fmt.Printf("%d", *r.port)
    }
    fmt.Println()
}
func main() {
    print(request{
        host: nil, // needs a *string
        port: nil, // needs a *int
    })
}

There are two, common — albeit far from perfect — solutions for addressing the issue:

• Local variables: a solution using temporary, local variables
• Typed helper functions: a solution using typed, helper functions

Next: Local variables