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Mastering Go – Third Edition

You're reading from   Mastering Go – Third Edition Harness the power of Go to build professional utilities and concurrent servers and services

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Product type Paperback
Published in Aug 2021
Publisher Packt
ISBN-13 9781801079310
Length 682 pages
Edition 3rd Edition
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Author (1):
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Mihalis Tsoukalos Mihalis Tsoukalos
Author Profile Icon Mihalis Tsoukalos
Mihalis Tsoukalos
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Table of Contents (17) Chapters Close

Preface 1. A Quick Introduction to Go 2. Basic Go Data Types FREE CHAPTER 3. Composite Data Types 4. Reflection and Interfaces 5. Go Packages and Functions 6. Telling a UNIX System What to Do 7. Go Concurrency 8. Building Web Services 9. Working with TCP/IP and WebSocket 10. Working with REST APIs 11. Code Testing and Profiling 12. Working with gRPC 13. Go Generics 14. Other Books You May Enjoy
15. Index
Appendix A – Go Garbage Collector

Reflection

We begin this chapter with reflection, which is an advanced Go feature, not because it is an easy subject but because it is going to help you understand how Go works with different data types, including interfaces, and why they are needed.

You might be wondering how you can find out the names of the fields of a structure at execution time. In such cases, you need to use reflection. Apart from enabling you to print the fields and the values of a structure, reflection also allows you to explore and manipulate unknown structures like the ones created from decoding JSON data.

The two main questions that I asked myself when I was introduced to reflection for the first time were the following:

  • Why was reflection included in Go?
  • When should I use reflection?

To answer the first question, reflection allows you to dynamically learn the type of an arbitrary object along with information about its structure. Go provides the reflect package for working...

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