Go Data Types

In this tutorial, you will learn what is data types and different types of data types such as int, float, string, etc are available in the Go programming language with examples.

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Data types refer to the type of data a variable such as int, float, string, etc can contain. This is also associated with the size of data a variable can store in the Go programming language. For example:

var X int = 25;

Here, X is a variable of int (integer) type and the size of the int is 32 bit for 32 bit systems and 64 bit for 64 bit systems.

Go Data Types

Data types in the Go programming language can be broadly classified as follows:

1. Basic Types
2. Composite Types

The above two types can be further divided into the following sub-categories.

1) Basic Data Types

• Integers
• Floats
• String
• Complex Numbers
• Byte
• Rune
• Boolean

2) Composite Data Types

• Aggregate or Non-reference types
• Reference Types
• Interface Types

Integer Types

Integer data types are used to store integer data. They can be two types: signed and unsigned.

Data Type	Description
int	Platform dependent. 32 bit or 64 bit
int8	Signed 8-bit integers (-128 to 127)
int16	Signed 16-bit integers (-32768 to 32767)
int32	Signed 32-bit integers (-2147483648 to 2147483647)
int64	Signed 64-bit integers (-9223372036854775808 to 9223372036854775807)
uint	Platform dependent. 32 bit or 64 bit
uint8	Unsigned 8-bit integers (0 to 255)
uint16	Unsigned 16-bit integers (0 to 65535)
uint32	Unsigned 32-bit integers (0 to 4294967295)
uint64	Unsigned 64-bit integers (0 to 18446744073709551615)

Float Types

Float data type stores floating-point numbers i.e. numbers with a decimal point.

Two types of float data types are available in Go. They are:

Data Type	Description
float32	IEEE-754 32-bit floating-point numbers
float64	IEEE-754 64-bit floating-point numbers

float64 is the default float type. When you initialize a variable with a decimal value and don’t specify the float type, the default type inferred will be float64.