When it comes to object-oriented programming, there’s so much prior work done before Go, that a lot of newcomers to Go can’t help but to bring some concepts over. One of these concepts are object constructors, for which Go doesn’t have an equivalent.
Interfaces in Go are a powerful language construct, which allow you to define and use objects of different types under a common umbrella interface.
What does that even mean? Imagine a Car, or a Motorbike. Both have a license plate. When we declare an interface with a License() string function,
both Car and Motorbike objects will satisfy this interface.
If you haven’t been living under a rock, you’ll know that recently there is an uptake in popularity of “Functions as a service”. In the open source community, the OpenFaaS project from Alex Ellis has received good traction, and recently Amazon Lambda announced support for Go. These systems allow you to scale with demand, and execute your CLI programs via API.
Let’s call this for what it is - the whole “serverless” movement is marketing for cloud stacks like AWS, that allow you to hand over any server management to them, for, hopefully, a fraction of your income. In concrete terms, this means that AWS and similar solutions take your application, and take steps to run and scale it based on demand in their data centers.
Importing packages is an integral part of most programming languages today, and Go is no exception. Importing packages in Go is, for the most part, a simple process. For most people, the basics of importing is enough, however there are some pitfalls that can show up and it’s always good to be aware of them.
Reflection is the capability of a programming language to inspect data structures during runtime. When it comes to Go, this means that reflection can be used to traverse over public struct fields, retrieve information about tags of individual fields, and possibly other slightly more dangerous things.
Error handling in Go is uniquely designed to be explicit in the intent. You should return possible errors from functions and check/handle those returns. This, in contrast with other programming languages, might seem verbose and unfriendly, but it isn’t really so. Let’s go over some basic examples and move on to something less trivial.
