What is a string in Go?

Question

Is a string in Go is like a char* in C (or a char[]) or a class string in C++... or something else?

I don't understand how a string can be a primitive type.

Answer 1

A string in go is represented by this structure in C

struct String
{
    byte*   str;
    intgo   len;
};

The str pointer points to the actual string data but this is not null terminated - the length is held in the len member.

So in C terms a go string is a long way from a primitive type, it is a pointer, a length and an area of memory.

However Go is not C and all of those implementation details are invisible to Go programs. In Go a string is a primitive immutable type.