How do you clear a slice in Go?

Question

What is the appropriate way to clear a slice in Go?

Here's what I've found in the go forums:

// test.go
package main

import (
    "fmt"
)

func main() {
    letters := []string{"a", "b", "c", "d"}
    fmt.Println(cap(letters))
    fmt.Println(len(letters))
    // clear the slice
    letters = letters[:0]
    fmt.Println(cap(letters))
    fmt.Println(len(letters))
}

Is this correct?

To clarify, the buffer is cleared so it can be reused.

An example is Buffer.Truncate function in the bytes package.

Notice that Reset just calls Truncate(0). So it appears that in this case line 70 would evaluate: b.buf = b.buf[0 : 0]

http://golang.org/src/pkg/bytes/buffer.go

// Truncate discards all but the first n unread bytes from the buffer.
60  // It panics if n is negative or greater than the length of the buffer.
61  func (b *Buffer) Truncate(n int) {
62      b.lastRead = opInvalid
63      switch {
64      case n < 0 || n > b.Len():
65          panic("bytes.Buffer: truncation out of range")
66      case n == 0:
67          // Reuse buffer space.
68          b.off = 0
69      }
70      b.buf = b.buf[0 : b.off+n]
71  }
72  
73  // Reset resets the buffer so it has no content.
74  // b.Reset() is the same as b.Truncate(0).
75  func (b *Buffer) Reset() { b.Truncate(0) }

Answer 1

Setting the slice to nil is the best way to clear a slice. nil slices in go are perfectly well behaved and setting the slice to nil will release the underlying memory to the garbage collector.

See playground

package main

import (
    "fmt"
)

func dump(letters []string) {
    fmt.Println("letters = ", letters)
    fmt.Println(cap(letters))
    fmt.Println(len(letters))
    for i := range letters {
        fmt.Println(i, letters[i])
    }
}

func main() {
    letters := []string{"a", "b", "c", "d"}
    dump(letters)
    // clear the slice
    letters = nil
    dump(letters)
    // add stuff back to it
    letters = append(letters, "e")
    dump(letters)
}

Prints

letters =  [a b c d]
4
4
0 a
1 b
2 c
3 d
letters =  []
0
0
letters =  [e]
1
1
0 e

Note that slices can easily be aliased so that two slices point to the same underlying memory. The setting to nil will remove that aliasing.

This method changes the capacity to zero though.