Structs Instead of Classes - OOP in Go
Welcome to tutorial no. 26 in Golang tutorial series.
Is Go Object Oriented?
Go is not a pure object oriented programming language. This excerpt taken from Go’s FAQs answers the question of whether Go is Object Oriented.
Yes and no. Although Go has types and methods and allows an object-oriented style of programming,
there is no type hierarchy. The concept of “interface” in Go provides a different approach that we
believe is easy to use and in some ways more general. There are also ways to embed types in other
types to provide something analogous—but not identical—to subclassing. Moreover, methods in Go are
more general than in C++ or Java: they can be defined for any sort of data, even built-in types
such as plain, "unboxed" integers. They are not restricted to structs (classes).
In the upcoming tutorials, we will discuss how object oriented programming concepts can be implemented using Go. Some of them are quite different in implementation compared to other object oriented languages such as Java.
Structs Instead of Classes
Go does not provide classes but it does provide structs. Methods can be added on structs. This provides the behaviour of bundling the data and methods that operate on the data together akin to a class.
Let’s start with an example right away for a better understanding.
We will create a custom package in this example as it helps to better understand how structs can be an effective replacement for classes.
Create a subfolder inside ~/Documents/ and name it oop.
Let’s initialize a go module named oop. Type the following command inside the oop directory to create a go mod named oop.
go mod init oop
Create a subfolder employee inside oop. Inside the employee folder, create a file named employee.go
The folder structure would look like,
├── Documents
│ └── oop
│ ├── employee
│ │ └── employee.go
│ └── go.mod
Please replace the contents of employee.go with the following,
1package employee
2
3import (
4 "fmt"
5)
6
7type Employee struct {
8 FirstName string
9 LastName string
10 TotalLeaves int
11 LeavesTaken int
12}
13
14func (e Employee) LeavesRemaining() {
15 fmt.Printf("%s %s has %d leaves remaining\n", e.FirstName, e.LastName, (e.TotalLeaves - e.LeavesTaken))
16}
In the program above, line no. 1 specifies that this file belongs to the employee package. An Employee struct is declared in line no. 7. A method named LeavesRemaining is added to the Employee struct in line no. 14. This calculates and displays the number of remaining leaves an employee has. Now we have a struct and a method that operates on a struct bundled together akin to a class.
Create a file named main.go inside the oop folder.
Now the folder structure would look like,
├── Documents
│ └── oop
│ ├── employee
│ │ └── employee.go
│ ├── go.mod
│ └── main.go
The contents of main.go is provided below.
1package main
2
3import "oop/employee"
4
5func main() {
6 e := employee.Employee {
7 FirstName: "Sam",
8 LastName: "Adolf",
9 TotalLeaves: 30,
10 LeavesTaken: 20,
11 }
12 e.LeavesRemaining()
13}
We import the employee package in line no. 3. The LeavesRemaining() method of the Employee struct is called from line no. 12 in main().
This program cannot be run on the playground as it has a custom package. If you run this program in your local by issuing the commands go install followed by oop, the program will print the output,
Sam Adolf has 10 leaves remaining
If you are not sure how to run this program, please visit /hello-world-gomod/ to know more.
New() function instead of constructors
The program we wrote above looks alright but there is a subtle issue in it. Let’s see what happens when we define the employee struct with zero values. Replace the contents of main.go with the following code,
1package main
2
3import "oop/employee"
4
5func main() {
6 var e employee.Employee
7 e.LeavesRemaining()
8}
The only change we have made is creating a zero value Employee in line no. 6. This program will output,
has 0 leaves remaining
As you can see, the variable created with the zero value of Employee is unusable. It doesn’t have a valid first name, last name and also doesn’t have valid leave details.
In other OOP languages like java, this problem can be solved by using constructors. A valid object can be created by using a parameterized constructor.
Go doesn’t support constructors. If the zero value of a type is not usable, it is the job of the programmer to unexport the type to prevent access from other packages and also to provide a function named NewT(parameters) which initializes the type T with the required values. It is a convention in Go to name a function that creates a value of type T to NewT(parameters). This will act as a constructor. If the package defines only one type, then it’s a convention in Go to name this function just New(parameters) instead of NewT(parameters).
Let’s make changes to the program we wrote so that every time an employee is created, it is usable.
The first step is to unexport the Employee struct and create a function New() which will create a new Employee. Replace the code in employee.go with the following,
1package employee
2
3import (
4 "fmt"
5)
6
7type employee struct {
8 firstName string
9 lastName string
10 totalLeaves int
11 leavesTaken int
12}
13
14func New(firstName string, lastName string, totalLeave int, leavesTaken int) employee {
15 e := employee {firstName, lastName, totalLeave, leavesTaken}
16 return e
17}
18
19func (e employee) LeavesRemaining() {
20 fmt.Printf("%s %s has %d leaves remaining\n", e.firstName, e.lastName, (e.totalLeaves - e.leavesTaken))
21}
We have made some important changes here. We have made the starting letter e of Employee struct to lower case in line no. 7, that is we have changed type Employee struct to type employee struct. By doing so we have successfully unexported the employee struct and prevented access from other packages. It’s a good practice to make all fields of an unexported struct to be unexported too unless there is a specific need to export them. Since we don’t need to access the fields of the employee struct anywhere outside the employee package, we have unexported all the fields too.
We have changed the field names accordingly in LeavesRemaining() method.
Now since employee is unexported, it’s not possible to create values of type Employee from other packages. Hence we are providing an exported New function in line no. 14 which takes the required parameters as input and returns a newly created employee.
This program still has changes to be made to make it work but let’s run this to understand the effect of the changes so far. If this program is run it will fail with the following compilation error,
# oop
./main.go:6:8: undefined: employee.Employee
This is because we have an unexported employee in the employee package and it cannot be accessed from the main package. Hence the compiler throws an error that this type is not defined in main.go. Perfect. Just what we wanted. Now no other package will be able to create a zero valued employee. We have successfully prevented an unusable employee struct value from being created. The only way to create an employee now is to use the New function.
Replace the contents of main.go with the following,
1package main
2
3import "oop/employee"
4
5func main() {
6 e := employee.New("Sam", "Adolf", 30, 20)
7 e.LeavesRemaining()
8}
The only change to this file is in line no. 6. We have created a new employee by passing the required parameters to the New function.
Here are the contents of the two files after making the required changes are provided below.
employee.go
1package employee
2
3import (
4 "fmt"
5)
6
7type employee struct {
8 firstName string
9 lastName string
10 totalLeaves int
11 leavesTaken int
12}
13
14func New(firstName string, lastName string, totalLeave int, leavesTaken int) employee {
15 e := employee {firstName, lastName, totalLeave, leavesTaken}
16 return e
17}
18
19func (e employee) LeavesRemaining() {
20 fmt.Printf("%s %s has %d leaves remaining\n", e.firstName, e.lastName, (e.totalLeaves - e.leavesTaken))
21}
main.go
1package main
2
3import "oop/employee"
4
5func main() {
6 e := employee.New("Sam", "Adolf", 30, 20)
7 e.LeavesRemaining()
8}
Running this program will output,
Sam Adolf has 10 leaves remaining
Thus you can understand that although Go doesn’t support classes, structs can effectively be used instead of classes and methods of signature New(parameters) can be used in the place of constructors.
That’s it for classes and constructors in Go.
I hope you liked this tutorial. Please leave your feedback and comments. Please consider sharing this tutorial on twitter or LinkedIn. Have a good day.
Next tutorial - Composition Instead of Inheritance
