Go supports pointers, which are memory addresses that offer improved speed in exchange for difficult-to-debug code and nasty bugs. Ask any C programmer you know to learn more about this.
You have already seen pointers in action in Chapter 2, Understanding Go Internals, when we talked about unsafe code and the unsafe package, as well as the Go garbage collector, but this section will try to shed more light on this difficult and tricky subject. Additionally, native Go pointers are safe provided that you know what you are doing.
When working with pointers, you need * to get the value of a pointer, which is called dereferencing the pointer, and & to get the memory address of a non-pointer variable.
Generally speaking, amateur developers should use pointers only when the libraries they use require it because pointers can be the cause of horrible and difficult-to-discover...