Can't return nil, but zero value of slice

Posted by Sergi on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Sergi
Published on 2012-12-20T09:58:26Z Indexed on 2012/12/20 11:03 UTC
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I am having the case in which a function with the following code:

func halfMatch(text1, text2 string) []string {
    ...
    if (condition) {
         return nil // That's the final code path)
    }
    ...
}

is returning []string(nil) instead of nil. At first, I thought that perhaps returning nil in a function with a particular return type would just return an instance of a zero-value for that type. But then I tried a simple test and that is not the case.

Does anybody know why would nil return an empty string slice?

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