Why is there a "new" keyword in Go?

Posted by dystroy on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by dystroy
Published on 2013-09-04T07:31:19Z Indexed on 2013/11/03 16:10 UTC
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instantiation

I'm still puzzled as why we have new in Go.

&Thing{} is as clear and concise as new(Thing) to Go coders and it uses only constructs you often use elsewhere. It's also more extensible as you might change it to &Thing{3} or &Thing{Feets:7}.

In my opinion, having a supplementary keyword is costly, it makes the language more complex and adds to what you must know. And it might mask to newcomers what's behind instantiating a struct. It also makes one more reserved word.

So what's the reasoning behind new ? Is it something useful ? Should we use it ?

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