In the Go codebase I am looking at, I frequently see stuff like the following:

some_func(&SomeStructType{
  some_attribute: get_ptr(some_object.some_var),
  ....
)}

func get_ptr[T any](val T) *T {
    return &val
}

I don’t understand why get_ptr is needed. Is there any material difference between this and

some_func(&SomeStructType{
  some_attribute: &(some_object.some_var),
  ....
)}

?

I’ve been reading a bit on garbage collection and heap/stack allocation in Go, and think I have the basics down, but I still don’t grasp why the helper would be needed here.