Welcome to tutorial no. 27 in Golang tutorial series.

Go does not support inheritance, however it does support composition. The generic definition of composition is "put together". One example of composition is a car. A car is composed of wheels, engine and various other parts.

Composition by embedding structs

Composition can be achieved in Go is by embedding one struct type into another.

A blog post is a perfect example of composition. Each blog post has a title, content and author information. This can be perfectly represented using composition. In the next steps of this tutorial we will learn how this is done.

Let's first create the author struct.

package main import ( "fmt" ) type author struct { firstName string lastName string bio string } func (a author) fullName() string { return fmt.Sprintf("%s %s", a.firstName, a.lastName) }

In the above code snippet, we have created a author struct with fields firstName , lastName and bio . We have also added a method fullName() with the author as receiver type and this returns the full name of the author.

The next step would be to create the post struct.

type post struct { title string content string author } func (p post) details() { fmt.Println("Title: ", p.title) fmt.Println("Content: ", p.content) fmt.Println("Author: ", p.author.fullName()) fmt.Println("Bio: ", p.author.bio) }

The post struct has fields title , content . It also has an embedded anonymous field author . This field denotes that post struct is composed of author . Now post struct has access to all the fields and methods of the author struct. We have also added details() method to the post struct which prints the title, content, fullName and bio of the author.

Whenever one struct field is embedded in another, Go gives us the option to access the embedded fields as if they were part of the outer struct. This means that p.author.fullName() in line no. 11 of the above code can be replaced with p.fullName() . Hence the details() method can be rewritten as below,

func (p post) details() { fmt.Println("Title: ", p.title) fmt.Println("Content: ", p.content) fmt.Println("Author: ", p.fullName()) fmt.Println("Bio: ", p.bio) }

Now that we have the author and the post structs ready, let's finish this program by creating a blog post.

package main import ( "fmt" ) type author struct { firstName string lastName string bio string } func (a author) fullName() string { return fmt.Sprintf("%s %s", a.firstName, a.lastName) } type post struct { title string content string author } func (p post) details() { fmt.Println("Title: ", p.title) fmt.Println("Content: ", p.content) fmt.Println("Author: ", p.fullName()) fmt.Println("Bio: ", p.bio) } func main() { author1 := author{ "Naveen", "Ramanathan", "Golang Enthusiast", } post1 := post{ "Inheritance in Go", "Go supports composition instead of inheritance", author1, } post1.details() }

Run in playground

The main function in the program above creates a new author in line no. 31. A new post is created in line no. 36 by embedding author1 . This program prints,

Title: Inheritance in Go Content: Go supports composition instead of inheritance Author: Naveen Ramanathan Bio: Golang Enthusiast





Embedding slice of structs

We can take this example one step further and create a website using a slice of blog posts :).

Let's define the website struct first. Please add the following code above the main function of the existing program and run it.

type website struct { []post } func (w website) contents() { fmt.Println("Contents of Website

") for _, v := range w.posts { v.details() fmt.Println() } }

When you run the program above after adding the above code, the compiler will complain with the following error,

main.go:31:9: syntax error: unexpected [, expecting field name or embedded type

This error points to the embedded slice of structs []post . The reason is that it is not possible to anonymously embed a slice. A field name is required. So let's fix this error and make the compiler happy.

type website struct { posts []post }

I have added the field name posts to the slice of post []post .

Now let's modify the main function and create a few posts for our new website.

The complete program after modifying the main function is provided below,

package main import ( "fmt" ) type author struct { firstName string lastName string bio string } func (a author) fullName() string { return fmt.Sprintf("%s %s", a.firstName, a.lastName) } type post struct { title string content string author } func (p post) details() { fmt.Println("Title: ", p.title) fmt.Println("Content: ", p.content) fmt.Println("Author: ", p.fullName()) fmt.Println("Bio: ", p.bio) } type website struct { posts []post } func (w website) contents() { fmt.Println("Contents of Website

") for _, v := range w.posts { v.details() fmt.Println() } } func main() { author1 := author{ "Naveen", "Ramanathan", "Golang Enthusiast", } post1 := post{ "Inheritance in Go", "Go supports composition instead of inheritance", author1, } post2 := post{ "Struct instead of Classes in Go", "Go does not support classes but methods can be added to structs", author1, } post3 := post{ "Concurrency", "Go is a concurrent language and not a parallel one", author1, } w := website{ posts: []post{post1, post2, post3}, } w.contents() }

Run in playground

In the main function above, we have created an author author1 and three posts post1 , post2 and post3 . Finally we have created the website w in line no. 62 by embedding these 3 posts and displayed the contents in the next line.

This program will output,

Contents of Website Title: Inheritance in Go Content: Go supports composition instead of inheritance Author: Naveen Ramanathan Bio: Golang Enthusiast Title: Struct instead of Classes in Go Content: Go does not support classes but methods can be added to structs Author: Naveen Ramanathan Bio: Golang Enthusiast Title: Concurrency Content: Go is a concurrent language and not a parallel one Author: Naveen Ramanathan Bio: Golang Enthusiast

This brings us to the end of this tutorial. Have a great day. Please leave your feedback and comments.

Next tutorial - Polymorphism



