Though plenty of people built up hype around interfaces in Go, I saw them as little more than a keyword. interface had obvious expressive powers but nothing more than for or struct. Definitely nothing that warranted the adjectives – “powerful”, “expressive” – that so many Go developers happily attached to them.
Go’s interface is similar to Java’s interface that you might be familiar with, but with some key differences. Like in Java, interfaces in Go are all about behavior. You can’t wrap instance variables or other data, only the the methods on top of that data. For example, a simple interface would be:
type NamedReader interface {
Name() string
io.Reader
}
Any type that satisfies this interface knows how to generate an ID. The implementation, however, is entirely hidden. We could have a counter that is incremented on each call to NextID, we could read from /dev/urandom or we could generate a GUID.