Max value that can be stored in iota type in golang

Technical Discussion
1

Can anyone please help me to know what is the max value that can be stored in iota type

1 Like
2

iota is not a type but a keyword to assist in creating enumerations. Perhaps you can show an example of code that illustrates your concerns?

3

if i type :
const (
b = iota
c
e
r
)

fmt.Println®

out put will be 3 because iota gets incremented by 1 for every variable.
So i want to know what is the maximum value that iota can store or there is no restriction to it.

4

That’s an interesting question as you’re creating an untyped integer constant and those can in theory be arbitrarily large. In practice there is likely to be a limitation at the size of an integer (32/64 bits) or something larger (256 bits?). I suspect your program’s source code will exhaust all available RAM to compile before you run into the limit, though.

5

Thanks for your reply,
I was trying to find the description for this on https://golang.org/pkg/builtin/
There it is mentioned that iota is untyped int constant.
May be it will have the size Int32 or Int64 based on the platform?

6

Maybe. You’d need at minimum 2^31 constants in your source, one per line, for that to be a problem though. At that point I suspect you will run into other problems, and that there are better ways to do whatever it is you’re doing.

7

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