Go Struct Embedding

By Boris Terzic on 2024-12-13

Today I learned that Go has something called struct embedding. I come from a mostly Java background and an AI code assistant suggested a struct that had a field in it that had no type. It looked a bit like this:

type Base struct {
    Name string
}

type Derived struct {
    Base
    Age int
}

In this example, the Derived struct inherits the Name property from the Base struct.

I had assumed that this notation was just a shorthand for a field of type Base with the name Base. But it’s not.

This construct is called struct embedding. It causes the Derived struct to have all the fields of the Base struct.

Even though this was a concept introduced by an AI code assistant I must admit that it was the same assistant that helped me debug the issue.