Comment by culebron21

> Ok, so mostly we agree.

I don't follow. Information isn't agreeable or disagreeable, it just is.

> And I was right that you can't just concatenate different slices

That's right. You would have to physically move the capacitors in your RAM around (while remaining powered!) in order to do that. Given the limits of our current understanding of science, that's impossible.

> hence Go has to do a lot of work under the hood to do that.

Do what? You can't actually do that. It cannot be done at the hardware level. There is nothing a programming language can do to enable it.

All a programming language can do is what we earlier demonstrated for arrays, or as slices allow dynamic allocation, if the original slice is not large enough you can also copy smaller slices into a new slice using a similar technique to the for loop above.

Go does offer a copy function and an append function that do the same kind of thing as the for loop above so you do not have to write the loop yourself every time. I guess that's what you think is magic? If you are suggesting that calling a function is magic, well, uh... You're not going to like this whole modern programming thing. Even Rust has functions, I'm afraid.

The Go standard library also provides a function for inserting into the middle of a slice, but, again, that's just a plain old boring function that adds some conditional logic around the use of the append and copy functions. It is really no different to how you'd write the code yourself. So, unless function are still deemed magic...

I may have misunderstood "you can't just concatenate different slices (e.g. to remove one item from the middle" but does [0] not do what you're talking about?

(with the caveat that anything else sharing `a` will be mangled, obvs.)

[0] https://go.dev/play/p/uQdoa3mUF00