There are no reference types in Go, everything in Go is passed by value.

When you pass a slice, for example, you are passing a structure that has a pointer to the underlying data by value; you could think of it as a reference BUT its not what you think it is. What you are passing around is actually a struct that is passed by value:

  type SliceHeader struct { //[1]
      Data uintptr
      Len  int
      Cap  int
   }

1: http://golang.org/pkg/reflect/#SliceHeader