Convert between slices of different types

go go-reflect

As others have said, casting the pointer is considered bad form in Go. Here are examples of the proper Go way and the equivalent of the C array casting.

WARNING: all code untested.

The Right Way

In this example, we are using the encoding/binary package to convert each set of 4 bytes into an int32. This is better because we are specifying the endianness. We are also not using the unsafe package to break the type system.

import "encoding/binary"

const SIZEOF_INT32 = 4 // bytes

data := make([]int32, len(raw)/SIZEOF_INT32)
for i := range data {
    // assuming little endian
    data[i] = int32(binary.LittleEndian.Uint32(raw[i*SIZEOF_INT32:(i+1)*SIZEOF_INT32]))
}

The Wrong Way (C array casting)

In this example, we are telling Go to ignore the type system. This is not a good idea because it may fail in another implementation of Go. It is assuming things not in the language specification. However, this one does not do a full copy. This code uses unsafe to access the "SliceHeader" which is common in all slices. The header contains a pointer to the data (C array), the length, and the capacity. Instead of just converting the header to the new slice type, we first need to change the length and capacity since there are less elements if we treat the bytes as a new type.

import (
    "reflect"
    "unsafe"
)

const SIZEOF_INT32 = 4 // bytes

// Get the slice header
header := *(*reflect.SliceHeader)(unsafe.Pointer(&raw))

// The length and capacity of the slice are different.
header.Len /= SIZEOF_INT32
header.Cap /= SIZEOF_INT32

// Convert slice header to an []int32
data := *(*[]int32)(unsafe.Pointer(&header))

You do what you do in C, with one exception - Go does not allow to convert from one pointer type to another. Well, it does, but you must use unsafe.Pointer to tell compiler that you are aware that all rules are broken and you know what you are doing. Here is an example:

package main

import (
    "fmt"
    "unsafe"
)

func main() {
    b := []byte{1, 0, 0, 0, 2, 0, 0, 0}

    // step by step
    pb := &b[0]         // to pointer to the first byte of b
    up := unsafe.Pointer(pb)    // to *special* unsafe.Pointer, it can be converted to any pointer
    pi := (*[2]uint32)(up)      // to pointer to the first uint32 of array of 2 uint32s
    i := (*pi)[:]           // creates slice to our array of 2 uint32s (optional step)
    fmt.Printf("b=%v i=%v\n", b, i)

    // all in one go
    p := (*[2]uint32)(unsafe.Pointer(&b[0]))
    fmt.Printf("b=%v p=%v\n", b, p)
}

Obviously, you should be careful about using "unsafe" package, because Go compiler is not holding your hand anymore - for example, you could write pi := (*[3]uint32)(up) here and compiler wouldn't complain, but you would be in trouble.

Also, as other people pointed already, bytes of uint32 might be layout differently on different computers, so you should not assume these are layout as you need them to be.

So safest approach would be to read your array of bytes one by one and make whatever you need out of them.

Alex

Convert between slices of different types

The Right Way

The Wrong Way (C array casting)

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