Base struct as pointer or sub structs as pointers

[Dean_Davidson]

This is similar in nature to this question where I posted a bunch of information that you might find helpful:

Can someone kindly ELI5 the difference between using slice of pointers and slice of structs?

I think the answer is “sometimes, maybe”. In the pointer case you are creating a copy of the pointer (which adds minimal overhead, but some). So, iterating over your structs without capturing the value and indexing into them would probably be the play: func Structs(animals []Animal) { // No pointer/struct allocation here; just index for i := range animals { // You could also capture a variable here like a := animals[i] fmt.Printf("%s %s %.2f", animals[i].Name, animals[i].Breed, animals[i…

And in that thread I told the OP to benchmark it:

GitHub - DeanPDX/struct-benchmarks

Which is exactly what I think you should do. Write some benchmarks and test memory usage. Also if you really want to get into memory optimization of your structs, you could take a look at padding/alignment. There’s a tool you can use to analyze your project:

GitHub - dkorunic/betteralign: Make your Go programs use less memory (maybe)