Comment by piano | Hacker News Reader

Comment by piano | Hacker News Reader

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> The thing I love about Go is its fundamental clarity. It's very upfront and literal. I find it easy to understand what is happening in any particular bit of code.

When reading Go codebase I'm not familiar with, I'm very often having a hard time figuring which interfaces go with which structs. As in "Oh, this function accepts interface Foo, which is implemented by which structures?" and then I have go on a adventure throughout the codebase to figure out what structures go in there. Really annoying.

In a language whose intention is to be explicit and easy to read (as opposed to write) I can't understand for the life of me why the authors chose to make interface implementations implicit. It seems like a decision that pretty much only has downsides and which is contrary to the overall aim. I just don't get it.

The one reason that comes to mind is that doing it implicitly lets you use structures in terms of interfaces even when those structures come from codebases you don't control .

Suppose Bob's codebase has a structure implA that implements interface A, and you want to use in terms of its interface. If the language requires Bob to declare implA as an implementation of A, you have to persuade him to do so in his codebase. But if implicit implementation is enough, then you can just use implA directly as an A with no changes by Bob.

But yes, this is a sore point. It would be convenient to be able to declare structures as implementations of particular interfaces, even if the current implicit behavior were preserved.

> Suppose Bob's codebase has a structure implA that implements interface A, and you want to use in terms of its interface. If the language requires Bob to declare implA as an implementation of A, you have to persuade him to do so in his codebase.

Not necessarily, in some lanugages you can add an interface to type even if the type is foreign and you only control the interface. I believe this can be done in Swift, Rust, F# and quite likely some others...

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