You are right that (2) needs to be dereferenced first, however, in go a pointer is autmatically dereferenced when accessing its properties or "methods". What I

You are right that (2) needs to be dereferenced first, however, in go a pointer is autmatically dereferenced when accessing its properties or "methods". What I mean by this is that if you want to access a property on thing, it would look the same. In C++ it would look like this: (1) x = thing.Property; (2) x = thing->Property; (or (*thing).Property) but in go, both would look the same, like this: (1) x = thing.Property (2) x = thing.Property So there is a difference syntactically, and the compiler will handle them differently, but whether the difference is semantically relevant is debatable.