How do you clear a slice in Go?

Setting the slice to nil is the best way to clear a slice. nil slices in go are perfectly well behaved and setting the slice to nil will release the underlying memory to the garbage collector.

See playground

package main

import (
    "fmt"
)

func dump(letters []string) {
    fmt.Println("letters = ", letters)
    fmt.Println(cap(letters))
    fmt.Println(len(letters))
    for i := range letters {
        fmt.Println(i, letters[i])
    }
}

func main() {
    letters := []string{"a", "b", "c", "d"}
    dump(letters)
    // clear the slice
    letters = nil
    dump(letters)
    // add stuff back to it
    letters = append(letters, "e")
    dump(letters)
}

Prints

letters =  [a b c d]
4
4
0 a
1 b
2 c
3 d
letters =  []
0
0
letters =  [e]
1
1
0 e

Note that slices can easily be aliased so that two slices point to the same underlying memory. The setting to nil will remove that aliasing.

This method changes the capacity to zero though.

It all depends on what is your definition of 'clear'. One of the valid ones certainly is:

slice = slice[:0]

But there's a catch. If slice elements are of type T:

var slice []T

then enforcing len(slice) to be zero, by the above "trick", doesn't make any element of

slice[:cap(slice)]

eligible for garbage collection. This might be the optimal approach in some scenarios. But it might also be a cause of "memory leaks" - memory not used, but potentially reachable (after re-slicing of 'slice') and thus not garbage "collectable".