Recently, I was looking at the Go codebase that was using map[int]bool to track unique values. As some of you may know, Go has no set data structure. Instead, developers usually use hash maps (key-value data structure).

The first idea that comes to mind is to use map[int]bool, where keys are integers and values are booleans. But experienced Go developers know that Go has an empty-struct type that can be used for maps: map[int]struct{}.

The benefit of such a type is that it occupies zero bytes in memory; it's a so-called zero-sized type. The compiler knows this and uses it to your advantage when it can. In this case, it should omit storing values and keep only keys.

So when I saw the bool struct, my first thought was to switch to map[int]struct{} to save some memory. In theory, that map can hold more than 100 000 integers.

To my surprise, this change had no effect on memory consumption when running in production.

Debugging the issue

I double-checked that using struct{} should save memory in Google and with LLMs. It was, in fact, true. After a bit more searching, I found that since Go 1.24, there is a new map implementation called Swiss Tables. A lot of articles, including the official Go blog, say that the new implementation consumes less memory on average (for all use cases).

If you specifically ask LLMs about Go 1.24 and map[int]struct{} (with web search enabled), they will assure you that using empty maps consumes less memory.

So what's actually happening?

What is self-hosted compiler?

Not to be confused with self-hosting a compiler, a self-hosted compiler means that the compiler itself is written in the same language. So, the current compiler for Go is also written in Go.

This has a big advantage. Since Go is a relatively simple language, we can quickly check how some of the parts are actually implemented.

I had an experience of looking at Python's dict implementation, and I can say that Go's source code is much easier to understand. Especially given that it's hard for a Python programmer with little C experience to understand complex C.

Go implementation

After looking at the map implementation, I found the structure of each slot (key and value pair):

type slot struct {
    key  typ.Key
    elem typ.Elem
}

Which can be translated to this:

type slot struct {
    key  int
    elem struct{}
}

The key requires 8 bytes, and the elem is zero since it's an empty struct type.

But here is a catch. The amount of memory that a struct uses is not always equals to the sum of its fields. Structs need padding to ensure proper memory alignment for CPU.

If the last field of a struct is zero, Go compiler makes its size 1 byte so that the field can be actually referred in memory by pointer arithmetic without violating memory access (out of bounds reads).

Go specs:

For a variable x of struct type: unsafe.Alignof(x) is the largest of all the values unsafe.Alignof(x.f) for each field f of x, but at least 1.

Now, since the first item is 8 bytes and our struct is 1 byte, we also have to align our empty struct. We need this so that the structure have proper alignment - multiple of 8. We do this by adding 7 bytes to the end that won't be used.

How about bool?

Boolean type in Go also occupies 1 byte and follows the same alignment rules described above.

That's why we get the same memory consumption.

Why did struct{} work before?

Prior to Go 1.24, maps were implemented differently.

Here is how it looked like:

type bmap struct {
    // tophash generally contains the top byte of the hash value
    // for each key in this bucket. If tophash[0] < minTopHash,
    // tophash[0] is a bucket evacuation state instead.
    tophash [abi.MapBucketCount]uint8
    // Followed by bucketCnt keys and then bucketCnt elems.
    // NOTE: packing all the keys together and then all the elems together makes the
    // code a bit more complicated than alternating key/elem/key/elem/... but it allows
    // us to eliminate padding which would be needed for, e.g., map[int64]int8.
    // Followed by an overflow pointer.
}

Prior to Go 1.24, keys and values are stored as separate fixed-size arrays. One array for keys, followed by second array for values.

When using struct{}, compiler omits the values array completely.

Conclusion

I think a lot of people still rely on this trick, but in newer versions of Go it won't work (at least for now). Using empty structs also hurts readability.

Another takeaway here is not to trust everything that LLMs say.