I'm not sure I 100% understand your question, but in Go a string is a two-word struct. type string struct { data unsafe.Pointer len int

I'm not sure I 100% understand your question, but in Go a string is a two-word struct. type string struct { data unsafe.Pointer len int } The C version would be typedef struct string { const *char data; int len; } string; Edit: oh, ok. I Googled the "painting algorithm" reference. I swear I had read that before :-)