set

Overview ¶

Package set provides a collection of generic, stateless functions for performing set-like operations on standard Go slices.

Core Philosophy ¶

Instead of introducing a new, stateful `Set` data structure, this package provides utilities that treat slices as if they were sets. This approach offers several advantages:

• **Lightweight**: It requires no new types, reducing the learning curve.
• **Idiomatic**: It integrates seamlessly with the rest of the Go ecosystem, which heavily relies on slices.
• **Functional**: It promotes a functional style of programming by taking slices as input and returning new slices as output.

The functions in this package operate on slices of any `comparable` type.

Usage ¶

Note: The output of these functions is not guaranteed to be in any specific order. If a stable order is required, sort the resulting slice.

setA := []int{1, 2, 3, 4}
setB := []int{3, 4, 5, 6}

## Union

`Union` returns a new slice containing all unique elements from the input slices.

union := set.Union(setA, setB) // Result (order not guaranteed): [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]

## Intersection

`Intersection` returns a new slice containing only the elements that exist in all input slices.

intersection := set.Intersection(setA, setB) // Result (order not guaranteed): [3, 4]

## Difference

`Difference` returns a new slice containing elements from the first slice that are not present in the second slice.

diffA_B := set.Difference(setA, setB) // Result: [1, 2]
diffB_A := set.Difference(setB, setA) // Result: [5, 6]

## Unique

`Unique` removes duplicate elements from a single slice.

items := []string{"a", "b", "a", "c", "b"}
unique := set.Unique(items) // Result (order not guaranteed): ["a", "b", "c"]