How to get the last element of a slice?

If you can use Go 1.18 or above and you often need to access the last element of a slice of some arbitrary element type, the use of a small custom function can improve readability at call sites:

package main

import "fmt"

func Last[E any](s []E) (E, bool) {
    if len(s) == 0 {
        var zero E
        return zero, false
    }
    return s[len(s)-1], true
}

func main() {
    var numbers []int
    fmt.Println(Last(numbers)) // 0 false
    numbers = []int{4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42}
    fmt.Println(Last(numbers)) // 42 true
}

(Playground)

No need to create a library for that Last function, though; a little copying is better than a little dependency.

For just reading the last element of a slice:

sl[len(sl)-1]

For removing it:

sl = sl[:len(sl)-1]

See this page about slice tricks