Interfaces are rarely rarely about interoperability even in Java. Most interfaces have one implementation. Instead, they are about abstraction, design, and so on. This article assumes that the end product is what was intended all along.
Close, with the exception of mocking interfaces for unit testing, which is very common in Java.
I am utterly sick of writing fragile scaffolding to deal with these dependencies, to the point I wish that Go provided an implicit interface for every declared type. Testing would be so much easier if I could pass in a MockFoo instead of a Foo, provided MockFoo satisfied the implicit interface.
At least you have the workaround
type PublicPart<T> = {[K in keyof T]: T[K]}; //keyof only sees public propertiesIt's awful to do in Java, but I felt fine doing it in go.
Then what you want is an abstract data type. Unlike interfaces, which can be implemented anywhere, an abstract data type is implemented in a single place. This has obvious benefits for performance (clients don't need to dynamically dispatch on operations), control (implementors don't need to worry about malicious clients supplying impostors) and precision (a single module can export several abstract types, whose implementations are mutually dependent).
Go's interfaces are pretty terrible at all of the above. Not that Java provides anything substantially better.
Guess what all nontrivial programs manipulate in the end.
> objects that don’t have such well defined invariants
... are either stateless or useless. It is impossible to define useful algorithms that manipulate objects of which you cannot say anything.
> No major language has adopted them for that reason.
The real reason is “programmers cannot reason about invariants anyway”.
(0) An ADT has a single internal representation that is known to the implementor, but hidden from users. The upside is that the ADT implementor can use his knowledge of the representation to optimize on n-ary operations, i.e., operations that act on several instances of the ADT. The downside is that ADTs cannot be extended by third parties. You would have to create a different ADT, even if satisfies the same contract.
(1) A Go interface has a list of methods, but does not proscribe any fixed internal representation. The upside is that anyone can create values of an interface type as long as they can implement the methods. The downside is that it is difficult to implement n-ary operations, because, at any point in the program, the implementor only knows the internal representation of the single value they are currently creating.
In other words, ADTs optimize for efficiency and predictability, whereas interfaces optimize for flexibility and extensibility. As a general rule, ADTs require more time than interfaces to plan ahead their design and implementation, but already implemented ADTs are easier to use correctly than already implemented interfaces.
While Go is reinventing the languages of the 80s in the 2010s.