What does (*[1

by

*[1 << 30]C.YourType doesn’t do anything itself, it’s a type. Specifically, it’s a pointer to an array of size 1 << 30, of C.YourType values. The size is arbitrary, and only represents an upper bound that needs to be valid on the host system.

What you’re doing in the third expression is a type conversion.
This converts the unsafe.Pointer to a *[1 << 30]C.YourType.

Then, you’re taking that converted array value, and turning it into a slice with a full slice expression (Array values don’t need to be dereferenced for a slice expression, so there is no need to prefix the value with a *, even though it is a pointer).

You could expand this out a bit like so:

// unsafe.Pointer to the C array
unsafePtr := unsafe.Pointer(theCArray)

// convert unsafePtr to a pointer of the type *[1 << 30]C.YourType
arrayPtr := (*[1 << 30]C.YourType)(unsafePtr)

// slice the array into a Go slice, with the same backing array
// as theCArray, making sure to specify the capacity as well as
// the length.
slice := arrayPtr[:length:length]

This construct has been replaced by a generalized unsafe.Slice function in go1.17:

slice := unsafe.Slice(theCArray, length)

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