Strings and string operations in Go:
In Go, string is a primitive type [1] as stated earlier in the report. The official blog [2] explains that
In Go, a string is in effect a read-only slice of bytes.
Like Python, string is immutable in Go and can be represented as the example below
const sample = "\xbd\xb2\x3d\xbc\x20\xe2\x8c\x98"
GO only allows limited operations on string as it is immutable [3] and represented as a byte-slice. Unlike C/C++, string in Go is not null-terminated. The runtime representation of string, StringHeader [4], has two fields to represent the string.
type StringHeader struct {
Data uintptr
Len int
}
The following example shows the limited operation on string.
// go run string.go
package main
import "fmt"
func main(){
var s1 = "hello"
var s2 = " world"
var s3 = s1 + s2
// var s4 = s1 * 2 // this line won't compile
// var s4 = s1 * s2 // won't compilre either
var c = s3[1]
fmt.Println(s3, c)
}
The result is
hello world 101
[1] https://golang.org/ref/spec#String_types
[2] https://blog.golang.org/strings