The unsafe Package

Go is a statically typed language, and it has its own runtime that does memory allocation and garbage collection. So, unlike C, all the work related to memory management is taken care of by the runtime. Unless you have some special requirements, you would never have to deal with memory directly in your code. When there is a requirement, though, the unsafe package in the standard library gives you features to let you peek into the memory of an object.

As the name suggests, it is normally not considered safe to use this package in your code. Another thing to note is that the unsafe package does not come with Go 1 compatibility guidelines, which means that functionalities could stop working in future versions of Go.

The simplest example you can find of using the unsafe package can be found in the math package:

func Float32bits(f float32) uint32
{
  return *(*uint32)(unsafe.Pointer(&f))
}

This takes a float32 as input and returns uint32. The...