How to "cast" a pointer back to a value in Golang?

Question

I'm using time.Time as a pointer in one of my structs. Eg

type struct Example{     CreatedDate *time.Time } 

I'm using the pointer, so I can pass nil to the struct, if no date exists.

This does however pose a problem now, since I need to use the time.Since(then) function which does not accept the pointer as the parameter, but takes a time.Time instead.

So...

It's quite easy to put "&" in front of a struct eg. &time.Time, but if you have a pointer, how can you reverse it, back into eg. a type of time.Time?

Eg. (does not work, but might give you an idea of what I mean)

var t *time.Time = &time.Now() var t2 time.Time = t.(time.Time) 

I hope you can help. The question feels quite silly, since I can't find anything about it when googling. I get the feeling I'm just missing something here ;-)

Answer 1

var t *time.Time = &time.Now() var t2 time.Time = *t 

Just like in C, & means "address of" and assigns a pointer which is marked as *T. But * also means "value of", or dereferencing the pointer, and assigns the value.

This is a bit off-topic, but IMO this dual use of * is partly what gets newbies in C and friends confused about pointers.