`Max`, min

Suppose you have 2 values and want to find out which one is higher or lower than the other. The max() and min built-ins in Go can be used for this purpose.

For slices, we cannot use max and min, but we can use the slices package and its generic methods slices.Max and slices.Min. These methods return the highest or lowest element in a slice.

Example

This program uses the min, max, and slices.Min and slices.Max methods in various ways. For slices, we must use the slices package methods.

Part 1 We use the min() built-in on 2 int values. This gives the result of 10, which is less than the other value 20.

Part 2 Max meanwhile return the higher (or highest) number in the argument list. Here it returns 20 instead of 10.

Part 3 Max and min can be used with more than 2 arguments—the highest or lowest of all the arguments is returned.

Part 4 For slices, we cannot use max() and min() directly. But we can use the slices.Max and slices.Min methods.

package main

import (
    "fmt"
    "slices"
)

func main() {
    // Part 1: use min with 2 int values.
    left := 10
    right := 20
    result := min(left, right)
    fmt.Println("min", result)

    // Part 2: use max.
    result2 := max(left, right)
    fmt.Println("max", result2)

    // Part 3: use min with 3 string values.
    result3 := min("coffee", "bold", "actual")
    fmt.Println("min", result3)

    // Part 4: use slices.Min and slices.Max on an int slice.
    values := []int{10, 20, 0, 100}
    result4 := slices.Min(values)
    fmt.Println("slices.Min", result4)
    result5 := slices.Max(values)
    fmt.Println("slices.Max", result5)
}min 10
max 20
min actual
slices.Min 0
slices.Max 100

Though finding the highest or lowest value can be accomplished with an if-check in a for-loop, max() and min require less code. This leads to code that is easier to maintain.

Max, min

Example

`Max`, min