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Struct composition with Go

dave.cheney.net

1–10 of 20 posts

Re: Struct composition with Go

#2
Since the purpose of this is apparently to provide a fake structure to test against - would another viable approach have been to implement a trivial `Close` function that doesn't do anything?

(context: i am no gopher)

(edit/tangent: i wonder how method calls from inside method calls are resolved when the names are ambiguous?)

Re: Struct composition with Go

#3
post #2

Since the purpose of this is apparently to provide a fake structure to test against - would another viable approach have been to implement a trivial `Close` function that doesn't do anything? (context: i am no gopher) (edit/tangent: i wonder how method calls from inside method calls are resolved when the names are ambiguous?)

You need quite a few more method to be a net.Conn actually: http://golang.org/pkg/net/#Conn. Easier to just overwrite the Write() method like this in that case.

Re: Struct composition with Go

#6
This is cool, but I find this snippet a tad bizarre:

  client, server := net.Pipe()
        var buf bytes.Buffer
        client = &recordingConn {
                Conn: client,
                Writer: io.MultiWriter(client, &buf),
        }
While it seemingly works, it seems confusing to assign client to an internal field of a new struct, and then overwriting that same client variable with the newly created struct...not to mention passing it into MultiWriter.

Anyway, I like those short posts like this. I've done similar things with embedding and struct "reconstruction" in order to elicit more testable code. It's powerful and useful, indeed.

Re: Struct composition with Go

#7
post #4

Is it reasonable to think of this as multiple inheritance?

Nope, this is composition, not inheritance.

It looks more like inheritance: the methods on net.Conn & io.Writer are automatically exposed. Are you saying that it is composition because you are "inheriting" from interfaces, which isn't traditional inheritance? Or if not, can you explain why you think of this as composition and not inheritance?

Edit: On further thought, this looks to me like composition with automatic delegation (a huge productivity benefit of inheritance). It is unusual because the combined class also implements the interfaces because of Go's interface rules, but I think that the late-binding to implementations is more similar to composition.

Re: Struct composition with Go

#8
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope, this is composition, not inheritance.

It looks more like inheritance: the methods on net.Conn & io.Writer are automatically exposed. Are you saying that it is composition because you are "inheriting" from interfaces, which isn't traditional inheritance? Or if not, can you explain why you think of this as composition and not inheritance? Edit: On further thought, this looks to me like composition with automatic delegation (a huge productivity benefit of i…

The inner structs (of which the outer writer struct is composed) cannot access any of the functionality or fields outside of itself. Each inner struct is completely encapsulated, so you can't override an inner struct method and expect the inner struct's behavior to change.

The accessibility of inner struct methods from the outer struct is a syntactic convenience.

Java: https://gist.github.com/jaekwon/8025b9f3a482b3219a21 Go: https://gist.github.com/jaekwon/0f6e5555ab6a592aa4c8

Once you Go, you never go back. ;)

Re: Struct composition with Go

#9
post #2

Since the purpose of this is apparently to provide a fake structure to test against - would another viable approach have been to implement a trivial `Close` function that doesn't do anything? (context: i am no gopher) (edit/tangent: i wonder how method calls from inside method calls are resolved when the names are ambiguous?)

If you just need a close that does not do anything, go has a pretty cool wrapper: `ioutil.NoopCloser`. It takes a reader and returns a reader that can be closed `io.ReadCloser`. Very useful for testing/mocking

Re: Struct composition with Go

#10
post #6

This is cool, but I find this snippet a tad bizarre: client, server := net.Pipe() var buf bytes.Buffer client = &recordingConn { Conn: client, Writer: io.MultiWriter(client, &buf), } While it seemingly works, it seems confusing to assign client to an internal field of a new struct, and then overwriting that same client variable with the newly created struct...not to mention passing it into MultiWriter. Anyway, I like…

What is the benefit of re-using the 'client' identifier? There's no closure capturing the identifier.

Compare:

        client, server := net.Pipe()
        var buf bytes.Buffer
        client = &recordingConn {
                Conn: client,
                Writer: io.MultiWriter(client, &buf),
        }
vs

        tempClient, server := net.Pipe()
        var buf bytes.Buffer
        client = &recordingConn {
                Conn: tempClient,
                Writer: io.MultiWriter(tempClient, &buf),
        }
The latter is less confusing to me.
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