What's the rationale for methods returning pointers in the ecc packages?

[samlaf]

What's the rationale for methods returning pointers in the ecc packages?

[ThomasPiellard]

Hi @samlaf , yes it's the exact reason, the goal was to mimic the big.Int api.

[samlaf]

Coworker made me realize it's probably based off of the big.Int API. They justify their API for eg by

(By always passing in a result value via the receiver, memory use can be much better controlled. Instead of having to allocate new memory for each result, an operation can reuse the space allocated for the result value, and overwrite that value with the new result in the process.)

Would be useful to add similar mentions in the doc, or at least link to the big.Int API in justification.

[samlaf]

Hi @samlaf , yes it's the exact reason, the goal was to mimic the big.Int api.

Thanks for confirming. Closing. Felt weird as a non-native go programmer, but now that I've internalized the pattern it actually makes total sense. Cheers