Most of the time you should just do what's natural imo.
If you're creating pointers just to return a pointer, or dereferencing a pointer just to pass by value you're asking for more bugs in your code.
#When making methods on structs is it better for performance to not pass the struct as a pointer?
green igloo
Unless it is a very large struct I guess it doesn't matter, if it is, I guess I'd use a pointer.
Also maps are reference types, which means that when you pass a map to a function or assign it to a variable, you are actually passing a reference to the original map.
rough gyro
If you want to know when it's better to pass pointers vs vals, look up the go ABI for your particular architecture.
rough gyro
this probably isn't a good benchmark. you should use the built-in benchmarking tools to figure out stuff like this.