But that's the thing right? Like I come from Java. In Java, we have objects. They are pointers. That's it. You don't get to decide on whether you want a pointer or a value (I guess primitives are an exception lol). But it was so simple!

And same in JavaScript. Everything is a pointer except primitives. That's it. End of story.

And I have written Rust too, and while the situation is definitely more complicated there, the guidance is extremely simple and straightforward: If the struct implements Copy, then it is very cheap to copy and you should pass by value. Otherwise, you should pass by pointer/reference.

And meanwhile in Go, I just see pointers and values being used seemingly interchangeably, and seemingly at random.