Go Methods

Internal

• Object-Oriented Programming in Go

Overview

Go allows associating arbitrary behavior with built-in or custom types, which contributes to the object-oriented character of the language. Note that Go is not a fully object-oriented language, it misses type inheritance, for example.

Syntactically, the association of the behavior with the type is done by declaring a function, encapsulating the behavior we want to add to the type, and adding a receiver type to its signature:

func (t ReceiverType) FunctionName(parameters, ...) (return_declaration) {
 ...
}

As result of this association, the function becomes a method of the type.

The declaration is identical to that of a regular function, with the exception of the receiver parameter, which precedes the function name. The receiver parameter gives the method's body access to the instance of the associated type.