What is the time complexity of searching for an element in a list implemented via a slice?

In Go, a slice is a dynamic array that stores elements in a contiguous memory area. Searching for an element by value in a slice requires iterating over the elements, as slices are not indexed by value.

Thus, the time complexity of searching for an element in a slice is O(n), where n is the number of elements in the slice.

Example of searching for an element:

func contains(slice []int, val int) bool {
    for _, item := range slice {
        if item == val {
            return true
        }
    }
    return false
}

Here, in the worst case, all elements need to be checked.