In Go, when a value is initialized without a initializer value it returns the “zero value” of that type.

In our contrived example below, when we initialize the User struct without an initialization value, we get the zero value of the struct. So when we get the Admin value, it returns the zero value for a boolean, which is false:

package main

import "fmt"

type User struct {
    Name  string
    Admin bool
}

func main() {
    u := User{}
    fmt.Println(u.Admin) //=> false
}

We didn’t explicity set Admin to false; Go did that for us.

The following zero values are created for their respective types:

• bool: false
• string: ""
• int: 0
• float: 0.0
• pointers, functions, interfaces, slices, channels, and maps: nil

Next time you’re working in go, think how you can use zero values to your advantage.

Learn more about zero values here.

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