How Does Go Represent Multidimensional Arrays and Slices in Memory?

Multidimensional Array Memory Representation in Go

Arrays in Go are always one-dimensional, but they can represent multidimensional arrays by composing single-dimensional arrays. However, in C, multidimensional arrays are essentially one-dimensional arrays with a size equal to the product of the row and column counts.

Array Memory Representation in Go

Go arrays are values, not descriptors. Each memory address is contiguous, so the second row starts immediately after the end of the first row. The size of an array is constant, regardless of whether you switch the rows and columns.

Slice Memory Representation in Go

A multidimensional slice is a slice of slices. Similar to arrays, each slice is a descriptor with a pointer to an underlying array, a length, and a capacity.

In terms of memory usage, the number of total slices matters. For example, two slices with 1000 elements each require less memory than 1000 slices with two elements each, even though both have the same total number of elements. A slice header requires 12 bytes on 32-bit architectures and 24 bytes on 64-bit architectures.

Additionally, elements of a multidimensional slice can contain slices of varying lengths, adding flexibility to the data structure.

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