You are correct, I was not being clear. They are not Go reference types are not reference types in the same way that they are in other languages. When you pass

You are correct, I was not being clear. They are not Go reference types are not reference types in the same way that they are in other languages. When you pass a slice around are are really passing a small struct around by value (http://golang.org/pkg/reflect/#SliceHeader http://golang.org/pkg/reflect/#SliceHeader), and it is that struct that contains the pointer to the data.