[reedjosh]

Yeah, and I kind of did that. But I've found it annoying and not great.

For example in the base struct I had an interface and a ton of methods that use it.

Then when I declared the concrete struct, I have to manually point the concrete type that matches that interface to the base class's interface.

Composition doesn't really allow the same thing as inheritance. Composition typically means you'll have a motor and wheel struct in your car struct and maybe your car struct uses both in some drive method.

Inheritance is more like having a car struct with a rev engine method, but no concrete engine set.

So you can later make a Kia, set the motor to a type, and then call the base struct's rev engine method.

Again, it's not impossible, just really ugly.

[throwaway894345]

Seems pretty straightforward to me:

    type Car struct {
        Motor Motor
        Wheels [4]Wheel
    }

    type Motor interface {
        Rev()
    }

    type KiaMotor struct { ... }

    func (kia *KiaMotor) Rev() {}

    func NewKiaCar() Car {
        return Car{Motor: &KiaMotor{ ... }}
    }

[reedjosh]

Took me a second to see the difference in what you were doing between what I was doing.

In your case you're making a Kia car by making a regular car with a Kia motor.

In my case (at work) I'm making a type KiaCar struct { Car ... }.

Which is why I have to link a concrete type in the KiaCar to the Car if I want methods with Car receivers and KiaCar receivers to use the same concrete Motor.

I do like what you've written above though. I'll consider if I can use that instead of what I'm doing currently.

I'm just not entirely sure how I'd write methods for the KiaCar that knows what its concrete type is.

[throwaway894345]

Yeah, I think very, very few problems (if any) are better-suited to being modeled with inheritance rather than composition. Go sort of forces you to think about composition, and once you get the hang of it I'd bet you won't go back. When you need reuse, reach for composition. When you need polymorphism, reach for interfaces/callbacks. When you need both (for example, a BookStore that works with both Postgres and SQLite backends) then you reach for both:

    type BookStoreBackend interface {
        GetBook(isbn string) (*Book, error)
        PutBook(*Book) error
        ListBooks() ([]*Book, error)
        DeleteBook(isbn string) error
    }

    // BookStore embeds (i.e., is composed of) a Backend, which is an
    // interface type.
    type BookStore struct {
        // ... other fields

        // Backend supports PostgresBookStoreBackend, SQLiteBookStoreBackend,
        // FileSystemBookStoreBackend, MemoryBookStoreBackend (for testing),
        // etc.
        Backend BookStoreBackend
    }