[threePointFive]

I like Go's approach to this same idea. The standard database/sql library provides the standard API and the individual database drivers implement their own backend. You can use the URI connection string for your database (ie. postgres://...) though only after including the driver in your file's imports. There's even the idiomatic underscore prefix to the package import to note that you're only importing it for how it's presence affects another package. Unfortunately there's no way to sway which package you're affecting, but its still better than hidden changes.

[didntcheck]

So basically JDBC? :) I think a similar approach is used with the crypto provider API and some others

IIRC (in JDBC) you also used to have to do `Class.forName("name.of.it")` somewhere before trying to do any DB access, to ensure that the static initializers had actually run, but I don't believe it's necessary anymore

(And then of course you have Spring Boot autoconfiguring which is another level of magic up, using automatic subclassing and proxy injection to add things like transaction management. And then you can get into proper classloader hackery)

[Groxx]

Essentially, yes. And you need to register before use in Go too since reflection is far more limited in Go - often this is done at init time, so you just import the package that does the registration [somehow], but ultimately you just have to do it before you use something: https://pkg.go.dev/database/sql#Register

The "data source name" string when connecting is... basically a JDBC connection string, and some adapters use exactly that iirc, but it's fundamentally an unstructured string that just serves the same purpose. Plugins can use anything they like, and style varies.