In the previous exercise we went over addresses, now let’s learn how to store them. In Go, pointers do that job for us. Pointers are variables that specifically store addresses.

We even set the data type of the addresses’ value for the pointer. For instance:

var pointerForInt *int

In the example above pointerForInt will store the address of a variable that has an int data type. To break it down further, the * operator signifies that this variable will store an address and the int portion means that the address contains an integer value.

With pointerForInt initialized, we can assign it value like so:

var pointerForInt *int

minutes := 525600

pointerForInt = &minutes

fmt.Println(pointerForInt) // Prints 0xc000018038

Notice in our example that minutes has a value of 525600, an integer type. Since we’ve initialized pointerForInt as a pointer that will hold the address of an integer value, we can then assign the address of minutes (&minutes) to pointerForInt. Printing out pointerForInt, we get another hexadecimal number: 0xc000018038.

We can also declare a pointer implicitly like other variables:

minutes := 55

pointerForInt := &minutes

Let’s see how we would create a pointer for a string instead!