Why did my value receivers have the same address?

📰 Medium · Programming

Understand why value receivers in Go may have the same address due to optimization of empty structs, and how to verify this behavior with a simple code example.

intermediate Published 27 Apr 2026

Action Steps

Write a Go program using an empty struct with a value receiver method
Run the program and observe the printed addresses
Modify the struct to include a field and re-run the program to compare the results
Use the `fmt.Printf` function with `%p` to print the address of the receiver
Verify that the address is the same for each method call when using an empty struct

Who Needs to Know This

Software engineers and developers working with Go can benefit from understanding this concept to avoid unexpected behavior in their code, especially when using value receivers with empty structs.

Key Insight

💡 Empty structs in Go occupy no memory, leading to the same address being printed for each method call when using value receivers.